Elon Musk is a gamer, that much is true. He’s spoken many times about different games he’s hooked on, previously Cyberpunk 2077 and more recently Diablo 4. But a few months ago some strange things happened when Elon started bragging about being one of the top-ranked Diablo 4 players in the world.
That was…true, technically. His account was indeed in the top 20 of Pit 150 runs in Diablo 4 for a time, globally. That raised some eyebrows, wondering how he did it, but now that he’s moved onto a new, similar game, that game’s community is not having it. Elon supposedly has god-tier, ultra-geared, endgame-stomping characters in Path of Exile 2. Except the community and its pros say, no, he doesn’t.
There is no reason to get too into the weeds here with hyper-specific Path of Exile terminology, but the end result is that Elon has some characters that are extremely high level with extremely powerful gear to the point where if you know anything about the game, you understand the sheer amount of time it would take to no-life the game to acquire all this. Time that no one can believe Elon has between his multiple companies, Trump administration DOGE duties and tweeting a hundred times a day.
The accusation from the Path of Exile community here is not that he’s cheating in a traditional sense, but that he’s having someone “pilot” or boost his account, ie. play it for him or gear him up, or he’s playing on someone else’s account altogether. A major point of evidence was a recent X stream, which at one point had over a million viewers, where he plays endgame content on his powerful character. And he…does not seem to fully know what he’s doing. At least not for someone who should have hundreds upon hundreds of hours into the game already to be where he is.
I’ve watched the stream myself as someone with almost 200 hours in and yeah, there are a lot of red flags. Among them:
- Elon tries repeatedly to click on a map node that is not connected and you can…not click on those. It’s essentially the fundamental point of the entire endgame map.
- Elon’s inventory appears to be full of trash that he has no interest in getting rid of. He attempt to pick up maps later, seems confused it won’t work, then manually drags them over individually into his inventory, which is not how you pick up things.
- Elon does not play with any sort of custom loot filter on which is essentially standard for any dedicated PC player. And he runs over valuable orb currencies without picking them up, seemingly not understanding their value.
- Elon does not seem to know the difference between level requirements for weapons and the actual level of the item itself, dismissing a powerful weapon for being too low, not making the distinction.
- During a boss fight, he seems to fail to understand he’s out of mana and only remembers to use his potion well after he should have.
All of these may be minor things, but they add up to a picture of someone who should not have a character this strong nor be one of the top ranked players in the world (which once again, he is).
But he’s still skilled right? This is hard content and he is playing it, right? Well, sort of. I also have this character, an Invoker ice/lightning Monk, and while no, it’s not as perfectly min-maxed as his, it is also a stupidly easy build to play, essentially two or three active skills you have to use supported by a bunch of passive buffs. The level of this character, the gear and no doubt the skill set-up means that this character is mostly on autopilot for almost all of this content other than perhaps some of the pinnacle bosses.
There is a mix of bemusement and outrage from the community about this. I mean, it’s just funny, as why would he bother doing this? As creator Quin said in his video about this, it would be more endearing to actually watch Elon pick up and play a new game from the start rather than…whatever this is (this entire thing with all these mistakes and lack of knowledge also seems to me like a Diablo player who hasn’t really figured out all the details of the more complex PoE yet, which is where I was weeks ago).
But the Path of Exile community is also pretty prickly, and many are calling for GGG to take action against him for boosting or account sharing as that’s against TOS and other players would be banned for it. So far that hasn’t happened, and it’s hard to produce explicit proof of this when no one has that data from behind the scenes. I have asked X for comment about Elon’s gaming status and will update if I hear back.
Until then, I look forward to seeing Elon take on Marvel Rivals season 1, taking his beloved role model Iron Man to the highest ranks of Grandmaster. See you then.
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
