Elon Musk Cheats at Video Games

Drew Harwell, at The Washington Post (gift link, via Harwell himself on Bluesky — which seemingly uses a ludicrously long 397-character token in the URL):

But after poring over his live-streamed gameplay, online sleuths recently made a shocking accusation: Musk had cheated. They suspected that he had pursued a widely mocked tactic known as “boosting,” paying strangers to play his character and rake in loot so that, when he logged in, he could face challenges with the most powerful gear.

Musk fought the allegations before ultimately confessing in messages this month. “It’s impossible to beat players in Asia if you don’t,” he wrote. A few days later, his character could be seen chasing treasure through the game’s sulfuric caverns while Musk was in the Capitol Rotunda, attending President Donald Trump’s inauguration.

Every cheater’s story is the same: “I’m not cheating, and I’m offended you’d accuse me.” Then, presented with incontrovertible proof, “I had to cheat because everyone else is cheating so it’s the only way to win, and anyone who isn’t doing it is a simp.” But the simple truth is that cheaters are rotten people, and most people naturally despise cheating.

But watching Musk’s streams, Jake began to suspect foul play. The billionaire did amateurish things, such as failing to drink mana flasks when he needed them and trying to pick up items when his inventory was full. And he made comments that struck devoted players as clueless, saying, for instance, that his character’s “Hand of Wisdom and Action” gloves, which rank among the game’s most valuable items, “could be better.” A normal gamer could write these off as simple flubs in the heat of battle, Jake said. But Musk was supposedly a global grand master, and gamers at that level don’t make these kinds of mistakes.

“It’s like if you said you’re the number two truck driver in the world … and when you try to get the truck to turn on, the windshield wipers start going,” Jake said. “It just felt like there was no way this guy did this.”

When Jake posted a thread on Reddit documenting Musk’s “suspicious” gameplay, the accusations kicked up a firestorm, with “Path of Exile 2” fans scraping through the streams Musk had posted to X for clues of what some were calling his “stolen valor.” [...]

By paying someone else to earn him his high-level gear, they said, he had removed most of the challenge — only to boast how quickly he had beaten others who played fair and square. One poster on a Diablo subreddit called it “unbelievably pathetic” that the world’s richest man would feel “the need to cheat” in a video game to “claim he is good at something” most people “couldn’t care less about.”

It’s the boasting that’s most revealing.

It’s a trope as old as fiction itself that villains cheat at everything. Auric Goldfinger cheated at golf, famously. And in Ian Fleming’s Moonraker (but not the movie), the whole plot was driven by M’s suspicion that mysterious millionaire (the billionaire of the 1950s) industrialist Hugo Drax was cheating at cards at their gentlemen’s club. He assigned Bond to figure out how he was cheating, and Bond stumbled into Drax’s plot to annihilate London. Drax, you see, is in fact a Nazi. And his industry: rocketry.

★ Monday, 3 February 2025