Gamers Suspect Elon Musk Is a Charlatan
How does Elon Musk find the time? Not content with spending his precious hours busting unions, hanging out at Mar-a-Lago, and catapulting meme coins to the crypto stratosphere, Musk is also a bona fide gamer god — or so he would have you believe.
On a recent X livestream, Musk played the just-released action-RPG Path of Exile 2, turning heads with two extremely high-ranking characters on hardcore mode, a punishing version of the game most notable for its permadeath mechanic. Unfortunately for Musk, he also turned heads for his lack of skill relative to these characters’ levels, causing gamers turned sleuths to conclude that Musk had cheated his way to these gigantic numbers, most likely by sharing his account with someone so that they could grind through the fantasy RPG for him. One YouTube commenter coined a different term for the tech boss’s dubious adventures: “fraudmaxing.”
The key evidence that Musk doesn’t know what he’s doing is as follows: Musk burns past the high-value items while picking up the worthless ones; Musk seemingly does not know which icon to click on to enter a map; Musk doesn’t seem to realize that he needs to replenish his mana (essentially his magic levels) in order to deal effective damage against a boss (it is unfathomable that he should not know how to do this if he’s played even an hour of any RPG); worst of all, and certainly the most painful to watch for a seasoned Path of Exile 2 player, is the way Musk — supposed veteran PC gamer — inefficiently drags and drops loot into his inventory.
Elon Musk, gaming god
— Dude Diligence (@0xDudeDiligence) January 11, 2025
streaming Path of Exile pic.twitter.com/dtjFgPoLu7
These are just the most visible examples. Fans of Paths of Exile 2 have broken down every suspicious moment from the stream, on Reddit (delivered in ice-cold bullet point format) and YouTube (most notably by New Zealand streamer Quin69TV). They take issue not only with Musk’s shaky gameplay, but also with how he characterizes the challenge he faces.
“This is max difficulty on hardcore. If there’s a way to get higher difficulty I don’t know what it is,” Musk said on the stream. Except that isn’t true at all. At that moment, Musk was playing a level most high-skill players use to farm resources and experience. As Quin69TV said, the tech titan was not presented with the “most difficult battles,” but Musk sure made it appear that way.
It’s worth noting that Musk previously made headlines in November for, in his own view, being a world-beating Diablo 4 player, claiming on The Joe Rogan Experience that he was a global top-20 player. (A claim that was maybe, kinda half-true according to a third-party leaderboard for an individual level.) He then posted a video with a run that suggested he could be the very best Diablo 4 player in the world — that’s now being used to mock Musk on X and other social-media platforms.
Musk getting roasted by gamers is, obviously, hilarious, precisely because he has spent so much time attempting to ingratiate himself to them throughout his cultural ascendancy. He’s posted cringe gaming memes and complained about “woke bs” in video games. Prior to the current Diablo/Path of Exile moment, there was the Deus Ex phase; at one point Musk claimed to sleep with a replica of the gun from the famed cyberpunk RPG franchise next to his bed. There are striking parallels between Deus Ex’s themes and Musk’s own intellectual interests, from transhumanism and rapacious capitalism through to conspiracy theories. In March 2020, as COVID-19 and government lockdowns swept across the world, Musk tweeted: “Feels like the plot of Deus Ex.” In the game, the so-called “Gray Death” virus is a government bioweapon, created and exploited by power-hungry elites in order to bring about a new world order.
Regardless of Musk’s cultural literacy and deep-state musings, he uncontroversially seems to see video games as an important cultural form that has the capacity to build community and enrich lives. It’s just that the recent revelations suggest some of his previous wizened remarks might be total bullshit, and that he simply views gaming as a medium to peddle his own boneheaded politics. “So many life lessons to be learned from speedrunning video games on max difficulty,” he wrote alongside his Diablo 4 video. “Teaches you to see the matrix, rather than simply exist in the matrix.” The point might land better if he was the one actually playing.
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