While Elon Musk was hobnobbing with other tech industry titans at President Donald Trump’s inauguration ceremony, he was in two places at the same time. Though he was seated next to Barron Trump in the cavernous hall where the president ushered in his second term, one of his video game characters was busy slaying monsters and collecting treasures in a new game called Path of Exile 2.
In a video showing Musk’s character in the game superimposed over his image at the inauguration, streamer Quin69 smirks and asks, “Wait Elon, how are you logged into the game Elon?” Quin69 boasts over 900,000 followers on the video game streaming platform Twitch, and a video on his YouTube channel titled “Elon Musk is Lying About Being Good at Video Games” has garnered over 1.2 million views in the month since it was posted.
The video, which sought to prove that Musk had paid to have his character “boosted” to a high level by others — in an apparent effort to impress the online video gaming community — was the culmination of a bizarre episode. The world’s wealthiest man, one of the most powerful individuals in the new Trump administration, found himself embroiled in online feuds with gamers, many of whom would have been his natural supporters, even as he was preparing to gut the U.S. federal bureaucracy.
Musk has a long history of promoting his video game credentials, perhaps as a way of appealing to a younger male demographic that has long been susceptible to his charms, including the image he projects of himself as a genius entrepreneur and successful online troll. That image has only been bolstered by his takeover of Twitter, which he renamed X.
Musk regularly streams himself playing video games on Twitch and has declared himself one of the best players in the world at Quake, a classic multiplayer shooter released in the 1990s by id Software, makers of Doom. In an interview with Joe Rogan, he bashfully nodded along as the famous podcaster extolled Musk’s skills in the games Starcraft and Diablo, asking him if he was in the top 20 in the world.
The Tesla CEO’s gaming credentials came into sharp focus last year when he became one of the world’s top players in Diablo 4, a popular hack-and-slash game from famed developer Blizzard Entertainment. Musk’s achievement was particularly impressive because he managed to do it in a mode called hardcore, where death in the game is permanent and forces the player to start over, and because he managed to do it while campaigning for Trump, running his companies and partaking in Twitter feuds.
Few at the time doubted his purported exploits in Diablo. He posted videos of his attempts at difficult dungeons and even recorded the ultimate death of his character. Diablo, though, is ultimately an easier game than Path of Exile, built around overpowered characters slaughtering demonic hordes en masse.
Path of Exile is a different beast, a far more difficult and methodical game with complicated systems. Musk’s ability to reach the worldwide top 20 leaderboards in the run-up to Trump’s inauguration raised eyebrows, since he essentially would have needed to play the game nonstop for two weeks to achieve the rank. Then he began streaming the game, and it was abundantly clear that he wasn’t familiar with its interface or his own equipment — or even with the game’s basic mechanics.
The kicker was that, at one point, Musk was apparently logged into the game and playing while at the same time speaking at a Spaces event on his X platform in support of Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party.
The response, naturally, was merciless, despite his large and dedicated fanbase on online platforms like Twitch and Reddit. Videos exposing Musk on the sites garnered millions of comments, views and reactions. One Reddit user described watching him fumble around in Path of Exile as akin to someone claiming to be a top-tier racer but having trouble opening the car door.
Eventually, Musk relented and admitted to buying “boosts” to make his video game characters more impressive than they were.
Why does the wealthiest man in the world, and one of the most powerful, care what a bunch of online gamers have to say about him?
Well, first of all, it’s not just a bunch of terminally online nerds that Musk is selling an image and persona to. The gaming industry in 2022 generated an estimated $184.4 billion, nearly four times as much as the music and film industries combined. All the top streamers on Twitch stream themselves playing video games, and the 20th most popular channel has over 7 million followers. Streamers, particularly the most popular ones, generate obscene amounts of revenue from subscribers and loyal fans.
Many of them are young and male, presumably a key target demographic for Trump’s Musk-backed movement. (Though while gamers are often typecast as right-wing due to scandals like Gamergate in the early 2010s — when women in the gaming industry were attacked — many millennials, who are part of the first generation to grow up playing video games, don’t fit that stereotype.) That said, Musk could well also be projecting a gee-whiz genius persona to even older voters who couldn’t wrap their heads around video games. Or his engagement with the gaming community could simply be because he is perpetually online — a function, in part, of owning X. For Musk, sentiments in his truncated public square, where he is the main character, could be a suitable proxy for public opinion.
Musk has tried on numerous new hats in the past year or so. He got into robotics, launching his Optimus robots through Tesla. He got into politics and now works in government, though not without friction. Beyond U.S. politics, Musk has dabbled in the politics of countries around the world. Gaming is just another one of the worlds in which he’s claimed immediate expertise.
An argument can be made about the intersection of gaming and right-wing culture wars, and Musk has seemingly approached gaming from such an angle. Between his posts last Sunday about his war on government bureaucracy, he wrote, “Video game ‘journalism’ is garbage.” Such a criticism is well-worn to the point of cliche but normally serves as an easy way to score points online within gaming communities.
But it appears his overtures toward gamers and proclamation of prodigious gaming abilities have been disrupted by the Path of Exile scandal and his subsequent beef with various popular gaming personalities like the streamer Asmongold (Zack Hoyt), who briefly lost his “verified” tag on X over it.
Now Musk has lost a great deal of goodwill from those gaming communities he had sought to court. For many, the scandal appeared needless and strange.
Posts online have jokingly referred to this as his first significant scandal, arguing that gamers were learning for the first time that Musk is perhaps not as all-knowing as he claims, nor as honest.
With every new hat Musk tries on and every new claim to be an expert, insiders in these fields have expressed shock at his lack of basic understanding and, more importantly, any curiosity to understand fundamentals.
In action role-playing games like Diablo or Path of Exile, players spend a great deal of time before reaching what is considered endgame content. Such content is usually coveted, so the run-up to reaching the endgame is considered a grind. Not so for the richest man in the world, it seems, who could just pay someone to play through those boring parts for him, setting him up to hop into the endgame with a powerful character that is still beginner-friendly.
The only reason Musk’s streams created a controversy is because he proclaimed himself a master gamer. When he streamed himself playing a video game at which he was supposedly ranked in the top 100 worldwide, it immediately became apparent to those in the know that he is not quite the prodigy he insists on presenting himself as.
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