Gamers Accuse Elon Musk of Cheating to Level Up
Elon Musk has long sought to augment his Silicon Valley celebrity with gamer cred, professing both skill and passion for a medium favored by tech geeks. A couple of years ago, he went so far as to explain why strategy video games are superior to chess. Yet his latest attempts to demonstrate his mettle in virtual worlds have other gamers crying fraud — and challenging him to prove his bona fides.
In an interview for Joe Rogan‘s podcast right before the 2024 election, Musk, who besides leading a suite of major tech companies and campaigning for Donald Trump, claimed that he was ranked among the top 20 players worldwide of the video game Diablo IV. While Rogan was wowed, this alleged accomplishment raised other eyebrows, since the dark fantasy role-playing game notoriously requires hours upon hours of investment to level up a character and beat battle scenarios. When on earth would he have time for all that?
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It soon transpired that the “top 20” standing had been overstated. Musk’s description of his Diablo prowess rested on a list independently maintained by helltides.com, not Activision Blizzard, the company behind the game. This unofficial leaderboard compiles the best times for completing a specific “endgame” level, and Musk did then sit at spot Number 19, having defeated a bunch of nasty monsters and final boss within an impressive span of just two minutes and 45 seconds. (He has since been knocked down to slot Number 54.) But that’s just one narrow metric for determining the “best” players, and the rankings were only based on recorded play-throughs submitted by Musk and a select few rivals — fewer than a thousand people altogether, out of the game’s more than 3 million active monthly players.
The gaming community remained somewhat split on the truth of Musk’s Diablo IV habit, with some presuming he had outsourced the tedious work of “grinding,” or developing a character powerful enough to take on the game’s toughest challenges, so that he could then swoop in and snatch the glory when the hardest work was already done. Another camp found it plausible that Musk was effectively blowing off his other responsibilities to game for hours at a stretch. And, while Musk told Rogan that Diablo IV was a way for him to unplug (“If I play a video game on extreme difficulty, then I have to concentrate fully on the game, and it has a calming effect,” he said), it’s certainly conceivable that he plays while attending to other business. After the downfall of crypto trading platform FTX, all kinds of stories emerged about CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, since convicted of fraud, playing games during important calls and interviews.
The debate called more attention to an earlier instance of Musk trying to show off his gaming knowledge. In 2022, he was into a different fantasy RPG, Elden Ring, which he called “the most beautiful art I have ever seen.” That year, he shared his “build,” revealing a “power mage” character along with its attributes and collection of weapons and armor. Apart from Musk’s most loyal sycophants, the build was almost universally ridiculed as the work of a complete novice. Critics noted that he was carrying extra items that made no sense — two different shields, for example — that would make his mage incredibly heavy, slow, and vulnerable to enemy attacks. At the same time, other equipment he had chosen wasn’t optimized for a heavily armored build. Again, Musk’s character had reached a decently high level, yet this further baffled Elden Ring fans who saw the screenshot as evidence that he didn’t understand the fundamentals of how the game worked.
Most recently, Musk has incensed gamers by climbing the leaderboards of Path of Exile 2, another RPG. In this game, Musk has played as multiple “hardcore” characters, meaning that once the character dies in the game, it is permanently deleted. One of these characters, “Kekius_Maximus,” ranked Number 59 in the world at the time of its death, having attained level 94 status. Another deceased character, “Percy_Verence,” currently sits at the Number 13 slot, with level 97 status. Musk livestreamed himself playing as Percy_Verence on Jan. 7 on X (formerly Twitter), and promptly drew suspicions that he had little experience with the game despite his leveled-up character.
As one Path of Exile 2 devotee laid out in a Reddit thread, there were many indications that Musk had no idea what he was doing, or at least did not have the grasp of the gameplay mechanics that would have allowed him to progress his character to such an advanced level. He struggled with elements of the map interface, made costly but basic mistakes, retrieved lower-tier items while bypassing more valuable ones, and appeared not to understand that he couldn’t pick up anything more when his inventory was full. One commenter concluded that he could not have gotten to that point in the game — clearing hundreds of thousands of maps — all himself. “His gear is better than a lot of full time streamers,” they wrote. “No way it is real.”
The comments on the YouTube video of the stream were particularly brutal, with many viewers considering it confirmation that Musk had outsourced the grunt work to reach character levels in the nineties, although there is still no actual smoking gun to corroborate the conjecture. “This sounds like a middle-schooler giving a book report on a book they’ve never read,” a commenter observed of Musk’s sometimes confused remarks while playing. “I love how the usual Musk supporter can’t defend him here because they outright don’t know shit about the game,” wrote another. “This has somehow become indisputable evidence that he is a fraud.” The top reply reads: “A lifetime of taking credit for other people’s work has led to this.”
The fallout was bad enough that on Sunday, YouTuber and Twitch streamer Asmongold directly accused Musk of getting an unfair leg up by letting someone else play on his account. “Did Elon Musk play this account to level 97?” he asked on his stream. “The answer is very simple: No. Unequivocally, without a doubt. If Elon Musk can prove that he played this account to 97, I will stream on X, starting the day that he proves it, for an entire year straight, every single stream.”
Most disheartened, however, were the gamers who had formerly expressed respect for Musk. As one X user who said they “defend him most of the time” put it in a post that has received nearly 100,000 likes: “elon lost the trust of all gamers overnight. boosting your account and lying about it is the worst offense. incredibly cringe, fragile ego on full display.” Another user replied, “man i still hope this isn’t true.. I’m such a big fan of his primarily because of his integrity.”
Musk, for his part, hasn’t responded to Asmongold’s challenge, nor has he revealed how his Percy_Verence hardcore character died since the awkward Jan. 7 livestream, and he has apparently not posted at all about Path of Exile 2 since Jan. 9. (He also didn’t immediately respond to our request for comment.) It could be that he’s pulling back on his elite gamer persona in light of the significant backlash. But whatever Musk’s true talents at the keyboard or console, we know his emotional relationship to the world of games is intense. The Battle of Polytopia, the video game he once called better than chess, caused one of the biggest fights he ever had with his ex Grimes, according to biographer Walter Isaacson. With both obsessively playing the game in 2021, the musician made an impulsive but tactical decision to betray and attack him after they had agreed to an alliance. Musk exploded at her, with Grimes countering that it was just a game. “It’s a huge fucking deal,” Musk told Grimes, according to Isaacson, and he refused to speak to her for the rest of the day.
With that kind of attitude — and Musk’s penchant for lashing out at his perceived enemies online — it may not be long before he turns hostile on the gaming community that had tacitly considered him one of their own.
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