We can't really talk about what multiplication "is" or "isn't" independently of context. It's an operation on two objects and the context its used in is necessa

We can't really talk about what multiplication "is" or "isn't" independently of context. It's an operation on two objects and the context its used in is necessary for defining the operation. Though it can be helpful to think of multiplication as scaling or rotation in certain contexts, or as repeated addition in others, none of those are a universal truth. To say it's not related to addition at all is also too broad to be true. They're related in many useful ways that other commenters have pointed out, in addition to the obvious way that in some situations you can define one in terms of the other. Even at the cutting edge, our inability to prove the Goldbach Conjecture might have something to do with not fully understanding the deepest relationships between the operations.