WASHINGTON, DC – NOVEMBER 13: Elon Musk listens as US President-elect Donald Trump addresses a … [+]
The story of Elon Musk Exile Road the controversy is quite strange. Musk, the richest man on the planet and a big supporter of President-elect Donald Trump, often boasts about his gaming skills at X/Twitter, the social media company he bought for $44 billion in 2022.
Musk has had a top 20 Diablo 4 account in the past, and recently raised eyebrows when he discovered that one of his Path of Exile 2 characters were among the most powerful in the world. Eyebrows were raised a little higher when Musk live-streamed himself playing the game, making all kinds of strangely weird mistakes that no seasoned, experienced high-level player would ever make.
Long story short Exile Road community and some of its content creators cast serious doubt on the veracity of Musk’s claims based on his character and his gameplay. This was, indeed, a high-level character with god-level equipment. However, Musk played like someone who had barely dipped his toes into the game, let alone the end game. You can watch the following video for an accessible explanation:
In a recent broadcast, Musk jokingly addressed allegations that he was using a Chinese player to “boost” his account, which is essentially hiring a skilled player to get you to a high level where you then you can get a loan. This happens all the time in the video game landscape. There are services for many competitive games out there that will “boost” your rank. Say you want to pretend to be a Top 250 War zone player but they are not very good. You can simply hire someone to “raise” you without lifting a finger. And while you won’t gain the skills or enjoy the time it takes to get good at it, you will have bragging rights. Based on a fiction.
In the broadcast, which took place at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Florida, via Musk’s Starlink Internet, players asked about the increase. “Yes,” replied the Space X CEO. “His name is Yilongma and he’s awesome. I rely on him for everything.”
This, of course, is a joking reference to Yilongma, a Chinese internet personality who bears an uncanny resemblance to Elon Musk. Musk continues to avoid any kind of admission that he hasn’t really raised his character. A number of major influencers and broadcasters have called the billionaire out on this, including Casual Kripp and Quin69TV and major publications like The Wall Street Journal have joined the fray, presenting a large amount of evidence in the process.
When popular broadcaster Zack “Asmongold” Hoyt called Musk, things took a dramatic turn. Asmongold – who has millions of followers on Twitch and YouTube – agreed with Quin69 and said that if Musk could prove that he himself got his character to level 97, he would start streaming on Musk’s platform, X ( formerly Twitter). “I feel like it’s a universal negative for him to do that and it just makes him look like an insecure #&*#$& doing it,” the broadcaster said.
Days later, the internet revealed that Musk had unfollowed Asmongold on X and Asmongold’s blue mark was gone (it has since returned). In a shocking move, Musk leaked private DMs between himself and Asmongold in an attempt to throw shade at the broadcaster that has since backfired spectacularly (sharing private DMs is against X’s terms of service).
Musk seems to believe that Asmongold hiring editors to post its Twitch content to YouTube means those editors are the broadcaster’s bosses, when they’re actually paid by Asmongold. More disturbing is the fact that X’s CEO would reveal a user’s DMs to the public.
Of course, Asmongold was most angered by Musk’s claims that he’s not good at video games:
Musk has yet to honestly and honestly address the growing claims surrounding him Exile Road character, but almost everyone outside of his biggest defenders and sycophants seems to agree that something is deeply off about the discrepancies between his live performance and the high-level persona he claims to have created and set up on his own, something that would take dozens and dozens of hours a week to accomplish — in addition to running multiple large companies, endless tweeting, and working alongside the incoming Trump administration.
Elon’s hardcore Path of Exile 2 character, Percy_Verence, is now dead. It seems his near-perfect gear (which Musk called out in his livestream as not high-end enough) wasn’t enough to save him.
It all adds up to one of the weirdest, most mind-boggling video game controversies I’ve seen in my thirteen years as an entertainment and video game journalist. As one of the commenters on Quin69’s video notes: “It takes a special kind of narcissism to be on track to be the world’s first trillionaire, meddling in governments all over the world and still insecure enough to lie that you are good at video games.
Really, it seems pretty clear to me that just gaming for fun and broadcasting to his millions of followers while he learns that the ropes would be much more engaging and fun and relatable than trying to pose as one of the top players. good in the world.
In fact, it reminds me of him in 2022, when Musk revealed his true weirdness The Elden ring character, everyone made fun of him for it, but I wrote a piece saying that this was gatekeeping and that people should be allowed to play their own weird and inefficient models if they wanted to. Not everyone needs to min-max or come up with the perfect meta-builds to have fun. And isn’t that what fun is all about? Who cares how good you are or how perfect your build is if you’re enjoying your time with the game. I’d rather play a poorly optimized game The Elden ring character rather than paying someone to raise me to the higher levels of Exile Street 2, that’s for sure. What time frame do we live in?
