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Last year on Joe Rogan’s podcast, Elon Musk claimed to be one of the world’s best Diablo IV players – and surprisingly, the leaderboards backed him up. For those that haven’t had the pleasure, Diablo is one of the most mercilessly time-intensive video games out there; you build a character and carve through armies of demons, spending hundreds of hours refining skills and equipment for maximum hellspawn-cleansing efficiency. I played it for maybe five hours last year and immediately quit, for fear that it would consume my life. Most of the people who play it are young, often male, and have plenty of time to themselves to spend on the internet and playing games – so, the exact demographic of many Musk stans.
It suited these hardcore gamer guys to believe that someone who tweets all day and runs several businesses was also an elite player who poured hundreds of hours into Diablo. This made him relatable. It fed into his preferred image of being the hardest-working man alive. But then Elon made the mistake of actually playing a game live on X, and it became clear very quickly that something was amiss. It seems Elon Musk might be a fake gamer.
On 7 January, Musk played Path of Exile 2, a very Diablo-like hack-and-slash game that came out towards the end of last year. His character was extremely well-equipped; suspiciously so. Viewers noted that he had better gear than some of the professional streamers who play this game all day every day, and he didn’t seem to know what their stats meant. I have not played Path of Exile 2 and so I can’t independently assess these claims – unlike Musk, apparently, I am quite happy to admit when I’m not an expert on a particular game – but within a few hours the many inconsistencies in his play and commentary were laid out exactingly on Reddit and in YouTube videos. (He also posted a suspiciously rubbish Elden Ring build back in 2022, which was dredged up as further evidence.) Evidently Musk forgot that we nerds are known for our attention to detail.
The implication is that Elon Musk is paying other people (most probably in China) to play these games for him, on his account, to make him look far more accomplished than he is. This practice is known as boosting, and it’s deeply embarrassing.
This has enraged the exact people that Musk has been trying to court with his gamer shtick. Asmongold, a successful streamer and YouTuber who is himself very popular with right-leaning young men, called Musk out on it. He responded by accusing Asmongold of being “not his own man”, beholden to his “bosses”, posting a screenshot of their DMs as proof – proving that Musk also doesn’t understand how YouTube works, because in those DMs Asmongold talks about the video editors who chop up clips for him, and they are definitely not his bosses. The feud, hilariously, is ongoing.
Over the weekend the musician Grimes, who has three children with Musk, tweeted in his defence. “Just for my personal pride, I would like to state that the father of my children was the first american druid in diablo to clear abattoir of zir and ended that season as best in the USA,” she wrote, definitely of her own free will. “I did observe these things with my own eyes. There are other witnesses who can verify this. That is all.” Her next tweet sounded rather more heartfelt: “sigh.”
There is no shame in being bad at video games. I honestly believe that most people are, by the standards of the internet, bad at video games. The shame is in being bad at video games and pretending otherwise. You cannot claim to be an elite gamer without putting in the work.
It amazes me that, at some point, appropriating nerd credibility became a thing. When I was growing up, there was absolutely zero value in being good at games (most unfortunately for me, a young Mario Kart and GoldenEye 007 prodigy). Not one of my university friends offered to buy me a pint when I completed Dark Souls. Now, though, there’s respect and credibility on the table for people who are talented gamers. You can make a good living out of it, on YouTube or Twitch or the esports circuit. Apparently being good at games earns you so much respect now that the richest man in the world might believe it’s worth his while to fake it.
The true irony here is that Musk stands accused of doing exactly what toxic nerds have been accusing women of doing for decades. Let’s say you’re playing a first-person shooter online and you get anywhere near the top of the leaderboard: an aggrieved man in the voice chat might accuse you of letting your boyfriend play for you. Women writing about video games in any capacity have to deal with comments threads asserting that, actually, you know nothing about them, and you’re faking it. Women who play games on Twitch are constantly told that they’re doing it for attention (please, guys, nobody wants your attention).
This very gendered condescension used to enrage me so much when I was a teenager that I made a point of becoming extremely good at the games I played, because I so deeply relished the looks on the faces of the boys who told me I didn’t belong when I would hand them their asses at Halo. I am far too old for that now, and too time-poor, but happily there now exist entire TikTok and Twitch accounts dedicated to this: women who are excellent at male-dominated games such as Call of Duty, obliterating men who shit-talk them in the lobby. I would pay so much money to see one of these women in a live match against Elon Musk.
In his endless X stream of bad jokes, grievances and cringe memes, Musk has tweeted a lot about “DEI” in games, a manufactured controversy that the left has infiltrated sacred gaming spaces in order to ruin them with woke. This rhetoric is designed to court the kind of people that were taken in by Gamergate many years ago, disaffected young men that former Trump strategist Steve Bannon cleverly recognised were invaluable to his cause back then.
What delicious irony that it is not women and minorities pretending to be hardcore gamers in order to manipulate people to their own ends, but, it seems, Musk himself.
