Elon Musk is a fake everything

Pharyngula 2025-01-17

I’ve been saying this for a long time: Musk is a poseur. He’s not a great engineer; when he directly meddled in the process at Tesla, the result was the Cybertruck, or his fake robot. He’s definitely not a good scientist, as witnessed by Neuralink. His efforts at social engineering are disastrous — look at what he’s done to Twitter. Musk is just a guy with a lot of money who buys people to do work he can attach his name to. The only thing exceptional about him is his ego.

So when he started bragging about being a great gamer, you could predict that that was all a lie.

During an appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience, Musk boasted that he was one of the top-ranked Diablo IV players in the world.

Shockingly, this turned out to be true (at least, at the time), but really, it shouldn’t have been possible—presumably, Musk doesn’t have enough spare hours in the day.

Recently, Musk attracted the suspicions of gamers again after revealing himself to be a top player of Path of Exile 2, with his high-level characters equipped with extremely powerful gear, indicating that a significant amount of hours had been pumped into his account.

Rather foolishly, Musk livestreamed himself playing the game, and gamers instantly clocked him as an inept player.

A detailed Reddit thread laying out the evidence against Musk makes it clear that he wasn’t familiar with basic gameplay mechanics of Path of Exile 2, and couldn’t possibly have leveled up his own characters by himself.

Gamers noted that Musk’s equipment was even better than Twitch streamers who play the game full-time for a living—the world’s richest man appears to have hired players to strengthen his characters.

I’m not a great gamer, not even a good one, but years ago I played World of Warcraft, and it was easy to tell when you had a fake player in your midst. Playing that game well required a thorough understanding of the mechanics — you had to be familiar with optimal sequence of attacks, you had to know the cooldowns on your magic items, you had to know the choreography of a boss fight. You could just use lots of money to buy top-tier gear, and you could pay someone to level up your character for you, but then the person who did that wouldn’t have the reflexes or the expertise to be effective. Those were the guys you’d invite to a raid because they had the glittering armor and the magnificent sword who would then, in the fight, stand in the fire and spam one button.

It’s easy for real players to spot the phonies.

It is pathetic that the richest man in the world who is running (badly) multiple companies and has the ear of the soon-to-be president and has what, 13 kids feels the need to pretend to be a super-cool elite gamer, too. No one is fooled.