LLast year on Joe Rogan’s podcast, Elon Musk claimed to be one of the best Diablo IV players in the world, and surprisingly the leaderboard backed him up. For those who haven’t enjoyed it, Diablo is one of the most relentlessly time-consuming video games out there. You spend hundreds of hours building your character, cutting through demon armies, and refining your skills and equipment to maximize hellspawn cleansing efficiency. I probably played it for about 5 hours last year, but stopped right away out of fear of wasting my life. Most of the people who play are young, often male, and have plenty of time to spend on the internet and play games. So it’s the same demographic as a lot of mask stans.

It was perfect for hardcore gamers to believe that someone who tweets all day and runs several businesses is also an elite player who has poured hundreds of hours into Diablo. This made him approachable. This was reflected in his preferred image of being the hardest working man alive. But then Elon made the mistake of actually playing the game live on X, and it quickly became clear that something was wrong. Looks like Elon Musk could be. fake gamer.

On January 7, Musk played Path of Exile 2, a very Diablo-esque hack-and-slash game released late last year. His character was very well formed. Suspiciously so. Viewers noted that he had better gear than some professional streamers who play this game all day every day, but he didn’t understand what that statistic meant. It didn’t seem like it was. I haven’t played Path of Exile 2, so I can’t independently evaluate these claims – apparently unlike Musk, I’m willing to admit that I’m no expert on any particular game – but , within hours many discrepancies were revealed that his play and commentary had been precisely laid out. on Reddit and on YouTube video. (He also posted questionable garbage elden ring build Back in 2022, it was dredged for further evidence. ) Apparently Musk forgot that we geeks are known for our attention to detail.

What this suggests is that Elon Musk is paying other people (presumably in China) to play these games on his account in order to appear much more successful than he is. It means that it is. This practice is known as boosting and can be very embarrassing.

This infuriated the very people Musk was trying to woo with his gamer tendencies. Mr. Asmongold, a successful streamer and YouTuber himself very popular among right-wing youth, criticized Mr. Musk on the issue. In response, Musk accused Asmongold of being a “not his own man” who was beholden to “bosses” and posted screenshots of their DMs as evidence. This proves that Musk also doesn’t understand how YouTube works. Because in those DMs, the video editors Asmongold chops up clips for him are not his bosses. Interestingly, this feud continues to this day.

Grimes, a musician who has three children with Musk, over the weekend. tweeted In his defense. “For my personal pride, my children’s father stated that he was the first American Druid to wipe out Jill’s Slaughterhouse in Diablo, and finished that season as the best in America. I would like to,” she wrote, clearly of her own free will. . “I observed these things with my own eyes. There are other witnesses who can prove this. That’s all.” Her next tweet was rather heartfelt. “Sigh.”

There’s no shame in being bad at video games. To be honest, by internet standards, I think most people are bad at video games. What’s embarrassing is being bad at video games and pretending you’re not. You can’t claim to be an elite gamer without putting in the effort.

It amazes me that at some point, appropriation of geek authenticity became an issue. When I was a kid, there was absolutely no value in being good at games (most unfortunately, I was a young Mario Kart and GoldenEye 007 genius). When I finished Dark Souls, none of my college friends bought me a beer. But now there is respect and trust in people who are talented gamers. You can make a good living on YouTube, Twitch, or the esports circuit. Apparently, he’s now so respected for being so good at the game that the richest man in the world might believe it’s worth his time to fake it.

The real irony here is that Musk is being accused of doing the exact same thing that toxic nerds have been accusing women of for decades. Let’s say you’re playing a first-person shooter game online and you’ve reached near the top of the leaderboard. A grumpy guy in voice chat might accuse you of letting his boyfriend play. Any woman writing about video games in any capacity has to deal with comment threads that claim they don’t actually know anything about video games and are just making things up. Women who play games on Twitch keep getting told that they’re doing it for attention (please, no one wants your attention).

As a teenager, this very gendered condescension made me so angry that I tried to be very good at the games I played. Because I was so happy to see the faces of the boys who told me they don’t play games. That’s when I give them their ass in Halo. I’m too old and don’t have much time for that anymore, but luckily there are now entire TikTok and Twitch accounts dedicated to it. In other words, women who excel at male-dominated games like Call of Duty will weed out the men who give a shit. They are in the lobby. I would be willing to pay a lot of money to see one of these women have a live match with Elon Musk.

Amidst the endless X-stream of bad jokes, rants, and cringe-worthy memes, Musk has tweeted a lot about DEI in gaming. This is a fabricated argument that the left has invaded a sacred gaming space with woke men to destroy it. This rhetoric appeals to the kind of people co-opted by Gamergate years ago, disaffected young people that former Trump strategist Steve Bannon wisely recognized as invaluable to his cause at the time. Designed to be loved by people.

What a delicious irony that it’s apparently Musk himself, not women or minorities, who pretends to be a hardcore gamer in order to manipulate people for his own ends.