- Elon Musk boasts being one of the top-ranked Diablo IV players . Some prolific gamers believe the Tesla CEO is cheating by taking advantage of a game bug.
Elon Musk’s to-do list includes serving as CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, overseeing X, acting as a close advisor to President-elect Donald Trump, and leading the Department of Government Efficiency.
In addition to those daunting tasks, he has managed to achieve the improbable: ranking among the top players in the popular dungeon-crawling video games Diablo IV and Path of Exile 2.
Some gamers, however, believe Musk lacks credibility and that the well-known tech titan could not have accomplished this feat alone. Some believe he hired a more skilled player to level up his character in Path of Exile 2, an action role-playing game published by Grinding Gear Games last month.
Others claim he exploited loopholes to access the best parts of Diablo IV, a similar game released in June 2023 by Activision Blizzard subsidiary Blizzard Entertainment.
Musk & Activision Blizzard did not immediately respond to Fortune’s request for comment.
In a Path of Exile 2 stream on Tuesday evening, Musk appeared to try to enter game portals he didn’t have access to and pass valuable in-game items without collecting them, indicating rookie gameplay, according to Vice.
The faux pas persuaded Twitch streamer Quin69 to claim 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 over 892,000 Twitch followers, stated during his stream. “This is straight-up account sharing.”
Piling allegations
This isn’t the first time a legitimate player has grown suspicious of Musk’s in-game achievements. Musk became one of Diablo IV’s top players on November 20 last year, when he posted a video on X of his record-breaking conquest of “the Pit,” the game’s final challenge, in less than two minutes.
The accomplishment came weeks after Musk appeared on the “Joe Rogan Experience,” where he claimed to be one of the top 20 Diablo IV players in the world. (According to Helltides.com, a Microsoft-owned leaderboard platform, Elon Musk is now ranked 53rd all-time in the Pit.)
“So many life lessons to be learned from speedrunning video games at maximum difficulty,” Musk wrote in the post. “Teaches you to see the matrix, rather than simply exist in the matrix.”
Diablo IV fans weren’t convinced. According to Luiz Felipe Terra da Silva, a 20-year-old student and TikToker in Brazil, it is widely accepted in the gaming community that Musk used a bug to set a new Pit record.
Indeed, some speculated that Diablo IV was experiencing a bug that inflated a player’s health around the time Musk posted the video of his record-breaking run.
Siqi Chen, the founder and CEO of finance platform Runway, joked that Musk hired a team of professionals to play the game for him. “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 posted to X in November.
Regardless of how Musk earned his ranking, Silva is saddened by one aspect of Musk’s public Diablo IV gameplay.
“If he loves the game, really, he should just play without these things,” Silva told Fortune. “I don’t see the reason to do this because he’s already famous—very famous.”
Musk’s ranking on Helltides.com is accurate, according to Fayz, the platform’s co-owner, who told The Verge in November. However, the ranking includes an asterisk.
Fayz stated that the platform is not affiliated with Activision Blizzard, the creator of the Diablo games, and that rankings are based on user-submitted videos, which number fewer than 900. Diablo IV has over 3.3 million monthly active users, according to game statistics website ActivePlayer.io.
“There’s no way for us to know about Pit runs that aren’t recorded and shared,” Fayz pointed out.
Musk’s work-game balance
Walter Isaacson, an author and journalist who will publish a biography of Elon Musk in 2023, has previously described Musk as a video game addict.
According to Isaacson, the tech mogul has even pushed back meetings to extend gaming sessions, citing games like Polytopia as helping to create better CEOs because playing helps others “remove empathy.”
Musk has never had trouble balancing work and play, with many of his Diablo IV streams gaining traction for disclosing Musk’s business plans. Reuters reporter Joey Roulette observed a SpaceX employee briefing Musk on Starlink Flight 5 while he was streaming last October.
“We were one second away from telling the rocket to abort…and try to crash into the ground next to the tower,” someone in the background said.
During a three-hour stream last January, Musk answered viewer questions about future plans for SpaceX’s Starlink, as well as his ambitions to build a video-streaming platform on X that could compete with Amazon-owned Twitch. These aspirations included a revenue-sharing program for X users.
In 2023, Musk broadcasted his gameplay on X for an hour to test the capacity of his social network.
“Great game,” Musk said in an X post about the broadcast, “one that is remarkably complex in interesting ways at maximum difficulty.”
