A few minutes into Elon Musk’s livestream of his hardcore character in the video game Path of Exile 2, someone DMed him ASCII art of Mario taking a shit on the name “Elon.” The fact that the world’s richest man and a self-professed epic gamer didn’t know he should turn off DMs before starting a livestream was weird. But it was a stream full of weirdness that pointed in one direction: despite claiming he was a high-level PoE 2 player, Musk didn’t seem to grasp the basics of high-level play.
Musk loves video games. He keeps a replica of the Diamond Back .357 handgun from Deus Ex: Human Revolution on his nightstand. Grimes, mother of three of Musk’s children, wrote a song about their relationship and his gaming addiction. He loves to talk about how he’s one of the best Diablo IV players on the planet.
For Musk, it’s important not to just project the image of a gamer. No. He has to be the best gamer. But his achievements don’t make sense, and his Path of Exile 2 livestream gave evidence of a man who is making it up as he goes along and, possibly, getting someone else to level characters for him.
On Tuesday night, Musk livestreamed a play session with his high-level Path of Exile 2 character on X. To the practiced eye, there were a lot of red flags. PoE 2 is an action RPG that’s similar to Diablo IV. Players comb maps for valuable items while leveling up their characters. Like Diablo IV, it can take hundreds of hours to grind a character up to max level and get the best loot.
Where the hell does Musk find the time? He’s the head of six companies and a close associate of incoming President Donald Trump. He posts on X, the social media site he owns, roughly 61 times a day. He meets with world leaders, attempts to bend national and international politics to his will, and still somehow has time to play games like Diablo IV and PoE 2 at the highest level.
Unless he is as full of shit as the ASCII Mario that took a dump on his name in his DMs.
“I can say after watching an hour of this livestream that I would put, like, $100,000 or more on a bet…that Elon did not level this character from level 1 to level 90 himself.” YouTuber Cynicalex said, commenting on the stream.
The suspicion among players who actually play Diablo IV and PoE 2 is that someone else is grinding an account that Musk takes over and claims is his. In that scenario, Musk isn’t actually putting the work in to grind these characters up, he’s just taking credit for someone else’s hard work.
Joseph Cox, co-founder of 404 Media is an action RPG fan with more than 500 hours in Diablo IV and more than 140 in Path of Exile 2. Cox told me he has long suspected that Musk’s vaunted achievements in both games were lies.
Cox has been on the Musk gaming beat for some time. Back in 2022, he broke down the poor mechanics of the billionaire’s terrible Elden Ring build. “Diablo IV players were already very suspicious of Musk’s alleged world-leading success in the game,” Cox told Gizmodo. “He tweeted about a Diablo IV loophole in October that would make your character unfairly strong, and the sheer time investment needed raised good questions about how a man who runs multiple companies would even have the weeks upon weeks to play that much if he wasn’t getting help from boosters.”
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That said, Blizzard will probably…
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 13, 2024
“Musk’s embarrassing Path of Exile 2 stream, as reported by VICE, solidifies those suspicions,” he said.
It’s important to note that Musk’s PoE 2 playthrough is in hardcore mode. In that mode, if your character dies the game deletes it. One mistake could mean the end of days of work and there’s no way to come back from it. A player with a high-level character in hardcore mode should know what they’re doing.
Yet Musk runs past high-level items that, based on his inventory, would be a massive boon. He attacks walls. He puzzles over pressing a switch that would open a passage to him. He’s got a specialized inventory tab labeled “Elon’s Maps,” suggesting that they’ve been reserved for him by someone else. He also doesn’t seem to understand how his character works and claims to be clearing a map at the hardest difficulty despite it being set to a low level.
“Running past super valuable items? Not knowing what vital endgame mechanics are? Not the behavior of someone who has put in a lot of their own time into the game,” Cox said. “Calling a stash tab ‘Elon’s map’? Exceptionally odd for someone allegedly playing their own character.”
Multiple Path of Exile 2 YouTubers posted videos critiquing Musk’s performance and they all came to the same conclusion: this is not a man who knows anything about high level Path of Exile 2 play. “What I do know is that if you’re a level 90 player, you do not make these errors,” Cynicalex said in his.
“Maybe you trick really braindead people who have no idea into thinking your high end in a game that they have no clue about,” Quin69TV said in his video on the stream. “What does that do? That does nothing. What’s the point in that? So you’re going to trick a bunch of boomers into thinking you’re good at games whenever boomers think the games are cringe as fuck anyway. It makes no sense. And it’s cringe.”
Cox was struck by Musks’ constant prattle about how he was playing PoE 2 at the highest level. “His constant emphasizing in the stream that what he is doing is very, very difficult while seemingly not understanding what he’s actually doing is incredibly on brand for the attention and love desperate Musk,” he said.