On January 7, multi-hyphenate billionaire Elon Musk took to his right-wing hate speech incubator X to stream an hour-long session of Path of Exile 2 (PoE 2), a recently released free-to-play action RPG.
At a glance, Musk appears to be one of the game’s top players in the world, with his character Percy_Verence near the top ranks of the game’s “Hardcore” mode, which allows for permanent character death.
But as many in the gaming community have pointed out, Musk was likely paying more skilled players to level the character up — and there’s ample evidence supporting that conclusion, as painstakingly documented on the game’s subreddit.
“What an ego-trip…” one X user wrote in a tweet that has since gone viral. “Elon Musk has been livestreaming himself playing overpowered Path of Exile 2 character, proudly and seriously pretending that he got there himselfand actual PoE veterans are laughing their asses off watching and dissecting that charade.”
“Why Elon, why?” they added.
Adding fuel to the fire was Percy_Verence’s sudden death at level 97 on January 10 — a demise that made it seem an awful lot as though Musk had killed the high-ranking character through overconfidence and incompetence.
“Probably got triggered by all the laughing and actually tried to play the character for five mins,” one Redditor suggested mockingly. “He can just buy another one.”
Fueling the fire is the context that the richest man in the world has a reputation for making unsubstantiated claims to further his own agenda. Just last week, he made the racist assertion that diversity, equity, and inclusion hiring programs were to blame for the fires raging in Los Angeles — before being put in his place by a firefighter in person.
But lying about being good at a video game — something an insecure middle schooler might do — does feel extreme. Is Musk’s ego really this thin?
The alarm bells were already sounding following Musk’s PoE 2 livestream on January 7.
As many high-profile PoE 2 players immediately noticed, there was something very off about Musk’s performance. In a recent video, New Zealand game streamer who goes by Quin69TV pointed out signs that Musk had no idea what he was doing — despite controlling a level 97 character, ranked 12th on the company’s Hardcore mode.
“Let me try to give you a quick understanding as to how hard it is to get to that level,” Quin69TV said. “Two weeks into the league when people are playing the game, staying up 40 to 50 hours without sleeping, only playing Path of Exile, the most try-hard guys in the world, the highest ranked player on the Hardcore trade league, was level 93.”
“Every time you level it up, it becomes exponentially harder to gain experience,” he explained. In short, to even get to 97, players would have to play the game “every day for the majority of their day.”
And Quin69TV showed that Musk seemed to have trouble navigating the game, at one point “sitting there like an old geriatric man, clicking this node, expecting something to happen.”
Musk “finally kind of gives up after a while and then realizes his mistake,” Quin69TV said.
Inventory management also didn’t appear to be his forte.
“It’s almost like he has no understanding as to what you’re even supposed to do with” his loot, Quin69TV argued.
At one point, during a boss fight, Musk ran right past a “chaos orb,” which is “one of the most important currencies” in the game, according to a gamer who goes by Kriparrian, who joined Quin69TV in analyzing the footage.
Instead, Musk picked up items called “maps,” which are essentially “worthless” for high-level characters.
During his stream, Musk also repeatedly visited low-level maps, which are conventionally used to “grind” or “farm” experience.
“I don’t know if he’s trying to deceive people watching this stream into thinking he’s doing some insanely hard thing,” Quin69TV said.
“It’s just him being bad, it’s just him being bad at this character,” Charles “penguinz0” White Jr. argued in a separate reaction video. “Whoever is piloting this account behind the scenes and boosting it lets Elon go and do these really easy maps where even he can get away with being bad and not be punished for it.”
“I don’t even think Elon Musk has done the campaign, honestly,” Quin69TV posited.
In short, Musk has lost a lot of goodwill and credibility in gaming circles with his painful charade.
“A lifetime of taking credit for other people’s work has led to this,” a YouTube comment on Musk’s live stream reads.
“Being the richest man on earth and simultaneously the saddest loser on Earth is a wild combination,” another user added.
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