A pointed cone has no nonzero line through the origin: equivalently . If , its quadratic form vanishes on the nonnegative orthant. Testing the coordinate vectors gives . Testing then gives
Since is a symmetric matrix, every entry is zero. Thus .
The identity matrix gives an interior point. For a symmetric perturbation with operator norm , the Cauchy-Schwarz inequality gives
This open norm ball around lies even in the positive semidefinite cone, hence in . Consequently and the interior is nonempty.
More generally, the interior of the copositive cone consists exactly of strictly copositive matrices. Positivity on the compact nonnegative unit sphere has a positive minimum and persists under small perturbations; a zero there is destroyed by an arbitrarily small negative multiple of .