Elon Musk is Being Accused of Using Loopholes & Hiring Better Gamers to Play as Him and Boost His Ranking in Diablo IV
Yahoo - Amid Elon Musk’s to-do list includes serving as chief executive of Tesla and SpaceX; overseeing X; and acting as a close advisor to President-elect Donald Trump and running the Department of Government Efficiency. In addition to those formidable tasks, he has managed to accomplish the improbable: Rank among the top players of the popular dungeon-crawling video games Diablo IV and Path of Exile 2.
However, Musk is lacking bona fides among some gamers who believe the ubiquitous tech titan couldn’t have achieved this feat on his own. Some think he hired a more skilled player to level-up his character in Path of Exile 2, an action role-playing game released by Grinding Gear Games last month. Others allege he turned to loopholes to best parts of Diablo IV, a similar game released in June 2023 by Activision Blizzard subsidiary Blizzard Entertainment.
Elon Musk is the prototypical example of "money can't buy happiness." Or free you of your stupid insecurities. I swear to god if Elon Musk and I swapped lives overnight Freaky Friday style, the first thing I'd do is sell off all my companies, pay whatever I needed to pay so that all my responsibilities were passed off to someone else, then take whatever billions of dollars I have left and ride off into the sunset. I'd live so happily ever after. The biggest obstacle would be convincing my loved ones that I've now taken the form of a South African billionaire. I think I could do it. There's things I know that nobody else possibly could. But then my fiancee would have to get over the fact that I look like Elon Musk now. Not that he's a necessarily a worse looking guy than I am. It's just a big change. I'd have a funny accent. It'd be a pretty major thing to overcome. But aside from that obstacle, with all that money, I swear all of my problems would be gone.
But in reality it's not that simple. Brains don't work that way. After a month I'd wind up depressed and missing my old broke life. Money isn't some magical cure all. Elon Musk proves it. He has everything in life. He can do whatever the hell he wants, whenever the hell he wants to. But when he looks himself in the mirror, he's not satisfied. He sees some faceless username of a guy who works part-time at GameStop and wants what he has. A super high rank in Diablo IV and Path of Exile 2. Since he doesn't have the time to earn it himself, he pays better gamers to play under his name and uses cheap loopholes to speed run the game faster (or something like that idk how Diablo works). And when he sees his username in the top 20, he feels better about himself. That's what's important to him. Despite all the money, power, influence, kids who hate him, etc. The thing that makes him happy is artificially climbing to the top of an online video game leaderboard so that nobodies on the internet respect his gaming abilities. It's crazy.
All these allegations are alleged. But the true gamers who've been watching him play are certain he's up to something.
In a Tuesday evening Path of Exile 2 stream, Musk appeared to try to enter game portals he doesn’t have access to and passed by valuable in-game items without collecting them, denoting rookie gameplay, Vice reported. The faux-pas convinced Twitch streamer Quin69 to allege Musk didn’t understand basic gaming conventions and was “boosting” his character by hiring a better player to “grind” through the game for him by completing tedious, time-consuming tasks.
“He literally has no idea what he’s doing,” Quin69, who has more than 892,000 Twitch followers, said in his stream. “This is straight-up account sharing.”
Avid Diablo IV gamers weren’t convinced. Luiz Felipe Terra da Silva, a 20-year-old student and video game TikToker in Brazil, said it was widely accepted in the gaming community that Musk took advantage of a bug in order to set a new Pit record. Indeed, some noted that Diablo IV was experiencing a bug that inflated a player’s health at the same time Musk uploaded the video of his record-breaking run.
Siqi Chen, founder and CEO of finance platform Runway, suggested in jest Musk hired a team of professionals to play the game on his behalf. “I have it on good authority that the most airtight NDA on the planet is the one signed by the team of progamers ghostplaying diablo iv for elon,” Chen wrote on X in November.
All Elon Musk wants to do is change the world and have people online think he's cool. Ironically, if he were just less online, everybody would probably love him. If he was more mysterious, did his work a little more behind the scenes, spoke only on what he knows, and didn't post memes, nobody would have a reason to dislike him. Who wouldn't like the guy using his personal fortune to make cool cars and explore space? That's awesome. But he wants to be cool in the online way. How many billions of dollars do you think Elon Musk would pay to be as good at posting as @bigcontentguy?
That's all he wants. To make a Sydney Sweeney has great breasts joke on the internet that everyone LOL's at. Not that he doesn't get a shit load of likes and engagement on everything he posts. He's massively famous. That comes with the territory. But it's not the same. He wants to go viral for being genuinely hilarious. By repackaging the same Twitter jokes in slightly original ways like the great anonymous burner accounts of our time.
I really hate that he's managed to attach himself to Donald Trump. It used to be you could make fun of Elon Musk for being a nerd on the internet and the only people you had to be worried about were Space X/Tesla/Dogecoin enthusiasts. Now it feels like you can't poke fun of Elon without people taking it as an indictment of America. Honestly, it was a savvy move by him. Going political to curry favor is a tried and true method of becoming popular on the internet. Just ask Clay Travis. But Elon's gotta be careful. Trump hasn't even been inaugurated yet and we're already getting reports like this.
Idk if that report is real, or if it's just something an intern at NewsWire is trying to speak into existence. But it sure seems like something that could happen if Elon lets himself get carried away. I'd be lying if I said I didn't have it on my 2025 bingo card.
Maybe these accusations of Elon Musk cheating at video games are nothing more than jealous gamers who refuse to accept the fact that a multi-hundred billionaire can run multiple companies, have political influence, and still be better than them at a game they dedicate their lives too. It'd be pretty badass of Elon were able to go head-to-head with one of these guys, or do anything to prove his gaming prowess to shut them all up. But if he were capable of doing that, I'd imagine he would have by now.
It's ok if you're not one of the world's best Diablo IV or Path of Exile 2 players, Elon. You have so much more going for you than that. So many more important things to focus on. Worry about colonizing Mars. Or infiltrating the White House and finding out their secrets about aliens, then getting banished from Trump's inner circle and releasing the alien files to the public in a fit of rage. Now that would be cool. People would love you for it. If you release the alien files, I promise I'll never say a bad word about you again.