In a surprise last-minute Joe Rogan show before the 2024 election, Elon Musk took the time to reveal that he was one of the top 20 Diablo 4 players in the world. Typical Musk braggadocio? No, actually, he was telling the truth. At the time, Musk was the 19th highest rated Diablo 4 player on the global Helltides list in terms of speed-clearing Pit 150, the current toughest challenge in the game.
Now, that’s changed.
In the wake of Donald Trump’s victory, Elon Musk has not been able to keep up that top 20 spot. He’s crashed all the way down to #36 in the world ranking list, with recent reporting putting him next to Trump on election night and on a call with Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy after the win. There have long been rumblings about Elon joining the Trump administration in some capacity, with one frequent idea floated that Musk would run the “Department of Government Efficiency” to cut out waste and hack through spending. It’s not clear if that’s an actual plan or Elon just wanted to make an agency to spell out “DOGE,” his favorite meme.
As for his Diablo 4 ranking, perhaps he’s finally run out of time to keep up his ranking. When I first reported about his standing, accusations flew around that Musk must be cheating in some way, paying players to pay for him or buying perfect black market gear. None of that was ever proven, however, and there is no disputing that Musk does in fact play a metric ton of Diablo.
The overall Pit 150 list has been the subject of some amount of scandal, with many of its top members being accused of using exploits to dramatically increase the stats of their gear behind normal capacity, but it’s not clear if it’s a priority for Blizzard to deal with this or not. Again, there’s no evidence to say Musk used any of these exploits.
This is, of course, not the most serious of posts here. But it has been rather funny to see that Elon Musk, a man running four companies, with 11 kids, tweeting a hundred times a day, somehow managed to also be a world-ranked Diablo 4 player. And just because he may indeed become Donald Trump’s Oz behind the curtain, that does not necessarily mean he will not still be able to carve out time for the massive amount of gaming he seems to do. I’ll keep an eye on the leaderboard.
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