Bitcoin’s mystery author dodges Grok’s style test—and Elon Musk’s double-space theory 🕵️

An open-source GitHub analysis using xAI’s Grok Bot found little stylistic overlap between Elon Musk and Satoshi Nakamoto, weakening the long-running theory that Musk created Bitcoin. The “satoshi-stylometry” project examined three writing fingerprints cited by supporters of the claim, finding that Musk’s raw X posts contained zero instances of Satoshi’s reportedly frequent double spacing after periods.

The analysis attributed Satoshi’s text samples correctly 27 out of 30 times and found that the purportedly “Satoshi” used two spaces after periods 95.3% of the time, while Musk did not. British spelling accounted for 32.7% of Satoshi’s examples, compared with just 0.65% for Musk, whose earliest testable texts from 2006 already used American spelling. Musk also ranked 30th of 66 writers for similarity in function-word patterns, while Bitcoin advocate Brad Mills ranked 52nd out of 66.

Other differences included Satoshi writing “e-mail” 17 times and “email” only three times, while Musk used “email” 65 times and never used the hyphenated form. Cypherpunk Hal Finney scored closer to Satoshi’s style than Musk, while Nick Szabo ranked further away. The method also correctly classified Satoshi’s samples in 27 out of 30 cases.

The researcher cautioned that the hobby-scale project cannot prove or disprove Nakamoto’s identity. Satoshi wrote emails and forum posts, whereas Musk mostly posted on X; smartphones may automatically convert double spaces; and the study found only eight Musk spelling examples before 2013. The theory has circulated since at least 2017, when a former SpaceX intern claimed Musk was Satoshi, but Musk denied it on November 28, 2017, stating: “Not true. A friend sent me part of a BTC a few years, but I don’t know where it is.” — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 28, 2017 Bitcoin’s creator remains unidentified.