According to this report, the author of of Monero's white paper and Satoshi himself maybe one and the same person/group.
Bitcoin appeared during a financial crisis on October 31, 2008, with the release of a whitepaper authored by the unknown Satoshi Nakamoto. Three years later, December 12, 2012, saw the presentation of the technology behind the cryptocurrency Monero in a whitepaper authored by the unknown Nicolas van Saberhagen. Historical research and textual analysis now indicate Satoshi Nakamoto and Nicolas van Saberhagen may have been the same person or group.
Nakamoto, despite celebrity-level fame, has eluded identification. He, she, or they are largely defined through the document “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System,” called the Bitcoin Whitepaper (PDF). It describes the multiple parts a cryptocurrency, including the blockchain and the proof-of-work algorithm that secures it without a central authority.
Saberhagen’s CryptoNote whitepaper, “CryptoNote 1.0,” also defined a new cryptocurrency, one focused on privacy and empowerment. It improved on Bitcoin by changing the blockchain structure and using a new proof-of-work, addressing issues that had arisen since Bitcoin’s invention. It also made a number of smaller enhancements to Bitcoin, like simplifying transaction scripts and dynamically adjusting block reward and size. The CryptoNote Whitepaper led to the creation of Monero.
The author of the Bitcoin Whitepaper had clear motive to write the CryptoNote Whitepaper (PDF). In a newsgroup posting on August 13, 2010, Nakamoto first posted the concepts for privacy in cryptocurrency that would later appear in the CryptoNote Whitepaper: the ideas of stealth addresses, which hide receivers in a cryptocurrency transaction, and ring signatures, which hide senders. Also, by the time of the CryptoNote Whitepaper, Nakamoto had witnessed the struggles with Bitcoin’s block size changes (Nakamoto himself stealthfully inserted a 1 MB block size limit into the Bitcoin codebase in 2010) and mining reward halving that the new whitepaper tackled.
https://www.monerooutreach.org/stories/satoshi-van-saberhagen.htmlI'm not familiar with Saberhagen, but maybe someone here who have been following Monero from the very beginning can shed some light on this.