Hoskinson Denies Rumors Of A Partnership With Musk
Hoskinson detailed several attempts by his team to connect with Musk’s companies, particularly X (formerly Twitter), where they proposed solutions to combat prevalent issues like fake accounts and bots. “We’ve reached out numerous times to try to engage with various people at X, even offering to do free work with verified tweets or other things just because it’s so bad right now with bots and these other things, and it’s just always silent,” Hoskinson lamented.
Despite these efforts, he confirmed that Musk has never discussed Cardano or any potential collaboration personally. “I even know Kimbal Musk and I’ve talked to him on several occasions […] never once has [Elon] mentioned Cardano or me or anything,” he added.The founder’s comments served to quash rumors that had suggested potential uses of Cardano’s technologies, like the Midnight sidechain, in Musk’s high-profile companies such as SpaceX or Tesla. The speculative excitement around such a high-caliber partnership had been a point of discussion among investors and enthusiasts, given Musk’s known interest in cryptocurrency and his impactful endorsements of Dogecoin.
Despite sharing mutual friends and professional connections such as podcaster Lex Friedman, Hoskinson expressed confusion and a bit of melancholy over the lack of engagement from Musk. “We share mutual friendships so I don’t know why we haven’t been able to square that circle […] maybe he’s got some people in his social circle that don’t like me and so he’s got some intel that I’m a bad person to work with or maybe it’s just he wants to do his own thing,” Hoskinson speculated.Addressing Musk’s enigmatic persona and unpredictable business moves, Hoskinson noted, “He’s a magical guy. So it’s really like a sphinx hard to understand his motivations and understand why he does what he does. Why does he have this bizarre fetish for Dogecoin? Is it that he owns 20% of the supply…don’t know with a guy like that that’s the magic of Elon Musk.”