# Elon Musk's Bitcoin Mystery Pick: Why Everyone's Talking About Nick Szabo

Elon just dropped a hot take on who really created Bitcoin—and it's not some random guess.

During a recent podcast, the world's richest man pointed to **Nick Szabo**, a crypto veteran who invented BitGold back in 1998 and literally coined "smart contracts." Musk's reasoning? "Nick seems more responsible for the evolution of those ideas than anyone else."

Here's where it gets spicy: A 2014 linguistic study by Aston University actually found suspicious similarities between Szabo's writing style and Bitcoin's white paper—same LaTeX formatting, overlapping phrases, the whole package. Looked like a smoking gun.

But Szabo himself? He's been denying it hard. "I'm afraid you got it wrong doxing me as Satoshi," he said years ago.

Musk's take is clever though—he's basically saying Szabo might not be Satoshi, but he's the intellectual godfather of Bitcoin's core ideas. And honestly? The guy's got a point. BitGold was literally the prototype, and Szabo's fingerprints are all over early crypto architecture.

The irony: Satoshi staying anonymous might be the most Bitcoin thing ever—keeping the project truly decentralized by disappearing into the ether. Vitalik tried the same move with Ethereum.

Szabo's still active on Twitter with 300K+ followers, so if you want to see what the alleged crypto godfather is thinking these days, he's right there.