The Mysterious Mr Nakamoto

A Straight-Up Legend

Eighteen months earlier, on New Year's Eve 2021, an email had arrived in my inbox.

"Subject: New information re Satoshi."

Ever since writing the Wired article, I'd periodically received emails like this. Bitcoin, and the broader cryptocurrency industry it begat, was still young enough that if you'd bought some as recently as 2017, you were an "OG"; journalists who'd covered the story in its earliest years were graybeards, and natural targets for anyone with a Satoshi theory to sell. Someone was always shopping a new Satoshi theory.

Usually, I paid little heed to these emails. Nakamoto news would rekindle a fleeting hope of learning something fresh and inevitably prove unconvincing. I was inured to the likelihood that the mystery would persist. This particular email hardly inspired confidence, being unsigned. I clicked it open anyway. There was no text, but a link led to a blog post titled "I'm the SpaceX Intern Who Speculated Satoshi Is Elon Musk. There Is More to the Story." The author, Sahil Gupta, had briefly produced a ripple on the internet four years earlier with another post making the case that Musk was "probably" Nakamoto. Now he presented further evidence: an account of an interaction he'd had with Musk's chief of staff, Sam Teller. It seemed slight and ambiguous, and I didn't respond.

Two days later, I received another unsigned email from the same address. This one contained a link to a page on GitHub, a website where software programmers share their work, featuring a detailed breakdown of Gupta's case for Musk as Nakamoto. Maybe because Musk was by then a fixture in the news, over the next few weeks I found myself mulling over Gupta's theory. I didn't know what to make of his arguments, which ranged from vague to highly technical. Finally, I wrote back to Gupta, who'd clearly sent the emails. He had, after all, in looking for someone to amplify his theory, singled me out.

"Thanks for taking the call," Sahil began. "I've emailed hundreds of reporters."

He was at home near San Jose, and we were on a video call. He wore a magenta T-shirt and silver can headphones and the shadow of a beard.

"It's remarkable how negative a caricature of Musk they have," Sahil continued, with an antsy energy. "They think he built a rocket and a car company by a fluke."

Sahil then described how he'd come to discover Nakamoto's real identity.

In 2015, when Sahil was an undergraduate at Yale University, he'd been impressed by what SpaceX was doing and had scored a summer internship writing inventory management software at its rocket factory in Hawthorne, California. "It was an amazing experience," Sahil recalled. Musk was in the office maybe three days a week, and Sahil would see him now and then in the hallways. After a "rapid unscheduled disassembly," the company's term for one of its rockets blowing up, Sahil was present as Musk gave a speech about how SpaceX was going to improve the technology and fix the problem. "It was very inspiring," Sahil said.

It was after his internship ended that he made the connection to Bitcoin. Sahil was majoring in computer science, and for a senior thesis he collaborated with two other students to propose a central bank digital currency called Fedcoin. "What if the U.S. could improve the dollar, taking the best aspects of Bitcoin?" he explained later. The paper's acknowledgments ended by thanking "Satoshi Nakamoto for being a straight up legend."

While researching the thesis, Sahil steeped himself in cryptocurrency literature, starting with the nine-page white paper where Nakamoto first described Bitcoin. Sahil had learned only recently that Nakamoto's true identity was a famous mystery. Reading the Bitcoin creator's writing, he was struck by similarities to Musk's language. Both spoke of "order of magnitude" reasoning and used the word bloody. Both argued from first principles. Nakamoto talked about money in a conceptual way, as Musk had done when he was an executive at PayPal in the early 2000s. Sahil learned that Musk, like Nakamoto, had a history of programming in the C++ language and was knowledgeable about economics and cryptography. Nakamoto also had demonstrated a mission-driven selflessness of a sort. "That's Musk," Sahil told me. He began to wonder: Might the inventor of Bitcoin have been in front of us all along, hiding in the dazzle of his own celebrity?

When Sahil graduated from college, he decided he wanted to work directly for Musk, in the office of the CEO. After emailing Musk several times, he got a phone interview with Teller, the chief of staff. Sahil told Teller about his background, but Teller said that he wasn't a good fit. Teller was looking for an administrative assistant; Sahil would be better off starting his own company.

"It was good advice," Sahil said.

As the call with Teller drew to a close, Sahil took a chance:

"Is Elon Satoshi?"

"Teller didn't say anything for fifteen seconds," Sahil told me. "Then he said, 'Well, what can I say?'"

"That was another big clue," Sahil said. "It's pretty clear what's going on. Like, I surprised him. The answer I got is pretty telling."

Later that year, Sahil wrote his "Elon Musk Probably Invented Bitcoin" blog post. He omitted what had been a private conversation with Teller, but he described the other parallels he'd found. And he argued that the Bitcoin community, which had been riven by strife over how and whether to mainstream the technology, would benefit from the return of its founder to guide it. A few cryptocurrency blogs picked up Sahil's theory, and Bloomberg News covered it. Musk himself tweeted: "Not true. A friend sent me part of a [bitcoin]* a few years [ago], but I don't know where it is."

Sahil eventually did go to work for Musk, getting hired in 2018 to help code Tesla's cloud software. He found it thrilling and fascinating how Musk, defying industry norms, located software engineers under the same roof as production workers. This was during the Model 3 ramp-up, and Sahil saw firsthand how Musk persevered through skepticism. Sahil told me that his Elon-is-Satoshi advocacy hadn't been a problem for his work at Tesla. "I admitted my attitude toward it. I really think Elon is Ben Franklin. I think my manager asked me about it once."

In time, Sahil left to start his own company, doing 3D virtual modeling for sites like Shopify. But as the years passed, and he connected more dots, his belief that Musk was Nakamoto became a conviction. He came across something Luke Nosek, a cofounder of PayPal, had once said while speaking on a panel at Davos: the company's original goal was to develop a currency free from banks. Sahil got a tip that Musk, like Nakamoto, had a history of using two spaces after a period in his writing. A colleague mentioned that Musk regularly flew in and out of Van Nuys Airport, which matched up eerily with perhaps the only security lapse Nakamoto had ever made: early in Bitcoin's history, an email from Nakamoto to another software developer inadvertently betrayed an IP address in North Los Angeles. Sahil learned that early Bitcoin coders had considered Satoshi "bossy"; Musk was certainly that. And what was Musk's brand, in those pre-Twitter days? Doing difficult things: making electric cars cool; landing a rocket on a barge.

In late 2021, Sahil decided that the moment was ripe to make another public push. Nakamoto was now seen almost universally as a benevolent genius, and Sahil felt that a rare window had opened when the media might finally accept that Nakamoto and Musk were the same person. SpaceX had successfully docked a capsule at the International Space Station, and Musk had recently been named Time's Person of the Year. He had even tweeted playfully about Dogecoin, a meme cryptocurrency. When Sahil published his new blog post, the one that prompted his email to me and hundreds of other reporters, he recounted the story of his interaction with Musk's chief of staff for the first time.

Now, on my computer screen, Sahil was saying he was "99 percent sure" about his theory. He chalked up others' doubts to prejudice against Musk. "I'm surprised people are skeptical of Musk's capabilities. That tells me there's a deep rut in society where people are not able to look at objective facts."

I had a few questions. Musk was an unusually capable person, but he had once described 2008-when he went into debt, got a divorce, and saw the third Falcon rocket in a row fail to launch-as the worst year of his life. Nakamoto had released the Bitcoin white paper in 2008. Could Musk possibly have had the bandwidth to create the world's first viable cryptocurrency, and then personally manage the software project for nearly two years, all while he was willing into existence an e-car industry and a successful private space company?

Sahil was ready with answers. He said he'd seen an interview in which Musk recalled that in 2007 he was spending only three days a month on Tesla. And hadn't Musk shown a prodigious ability to work on several unrelated projects at the same time? He even had a history of releasing a bold product idea in a white...