THE WASHINGTON POST: Does Elon Musk cheat at video games? An investigation

Elon Musk - head of six companies, father of 11 children, a friend of the president and the richest man on the planet - often brags to the world about one of his great passions: his skill at video games.

He boasted to Joe Rogan that he ranked among the world’s best players of the role-playing game Diablo 4, a feat for which Rogan said he had “to be exceptional - period - as a human being.” Musk told the podcaster Lex Fridman he “can cruise through Tier 100 Nightmare Dungeons like a stroll in the park.” And last month, he shared regular updates on his social network, X, about how quickly he had conquered the global leaderboards of another game, Path of Exile 2, blasting “through the “toughest content, popping monsters like balloons”.

But after poring over his live-streamed gameplay, online sleuths recently made a shocking accusation: Musk had cheated. They suspected 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 sulphuric caverns while Musk was in the Capitol Rotunda, attending President Donald Trump’s inauguration.

As scandals go, Musk’s drama isn’t exactly Watergate. But it has nevertheless baffled a community of gamers that once deified him as a celebrity geek and has raised questions among former fans about his need for online praise and domination. Why would a famous billionaire, at the peak of his real-world power, care so much about beating nobodies in a fantasy video game?

“Elon lost the trust of all gamers overnight,” Dan Nelson, a programmer in Philadelphia, said in an X post liked more than 100,000 times. “Boosting your account and lying about it is the worst offence. incredibly cringe, fragile ego on full display.”

Musk did not respond to requests for comment.

The strange episode has undercut Musk amid a rapid rise in his political prominence, as a top Republican donor and the leader of the Trump administration’s new “Department of Government Efficiency,” a nongovernmental advisory panel known as DOGE.

During the presidential campaign, Musk often streamed himself gaming while aboard his private jet and at Trump’s Palm Beach club, Mar-a-Lago, sometimes playing for five hours straight.

While playing Path of Exile 2 this month, Musk said he told Trump, whom he called an “awesome dude,” that video games were kind of like his version of golf. “I’m a 21st-century digital boy,” he said. (Trump has faced cheating allegations of his own with golf, which he has denied.)

Musk says gaming has a “restoring effect” that helps his “mental calibration” and that, as he said in a 2023 interview, “Killing the demons in a video game calms the demons in my mind.”

He has also boasted that his demon-slaying prowess reflects a supreme focus and intellect. “So many life lessons to be learned from speedrunning video games on max difficulty,” he said in an X post in November. “Teaches you to see the matrix, rather than simply exist in the matrix.”

Musk’s commitment to gaming, including while his son crawls across his chest, earned him a fandom with gamers half his age, some of whom he has played with during streams and have commended him for “tryhard-ing” - a gamer term of endearment for grinding through difficult feats.

“Christmas Eve, I spent 17 hours on Diablo,” Musk told one streamer last year. (Shivon Zilis, an executive at his Neuralink company and the mother of three of his children, said on X this month that Musk “took breaks for family meals and Xmas presents” that day and that it “was a joy to see him having so much fun.”)

Musk’s world-ranking feat in Diablo 4 marked a high point for his gaming cred. It’s a type of game known as a “dungeon crawler,” in which players occupying the roles of rogues and mages blast through demonic realms, winning weapons and armour to face down increasingly brutal challenges. Though millions compete to scale the online leaderboards, Musk’s character beat them all, logging a record-setting time in an ultra-hard level known as Pit 150.

Last month, when Musk began streaming himself playing Path of Exile 2, a gamer living in Washington named Jake excitedly began to follow along. That’s when the cracks in Musk’s facade began to show.

Jake, a cybersecurity contractor who spoke on the condition that his last name be withheld for fear of reprisal from Musk, had been playing the game with his wife and knew how punishingly complicated it could be. The top-ranking gamers often played about 16 hours a day to earn the loot needed to stay ahead.

So Jake was surprised when Musk began showing up alongside players who were grinding their lives away; in a leaderboard for the game’s “hardcore” mode, in which characters have one life, and death is permanent, Musk quickly climbed to No. 21 in the world.

On X, Musk had used an alternate account, called @cyb3rgam3r420, to publicly journal his “rapid progress.” In the game, Musk liked playing as an “invoker,” a magical warrior monk, and called his characters names like “Kekius Maximus.” When Kekius died, at level 94, Musk posted, “RIP noble warrior.”

But watching Musk’s streams, Jake began to suspect foul play. The billionaire did amateurish things, like 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 No. 2 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.”

Quintin Crawford, a New Zealand-based streamer known as Quin69, screamed at the screen as he watched Musk leave precious currencies on the dungeon floor: “Dude, you are not this far in the game and running past Chaos Orbs!”

The accusations soured Musk in the eyes of some hardcore gamers, for whom “grinding” out challenges, “farming” loot and “no-life-ing” games are seen as virtues of endurance and self-sacrifice. 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.”

Some fans, however, said they would have understood if Musk, with his unusual schedule and exorbitant wealth, had just come clean upfront about paying for in-game perks rather than earning them himself. Though boosting is a violation of the game’s terms of service, several companies now offer “Power Levelling” services for players wanting to “start conquering”; one marketplace, Overgear, advertises a remotely piloted, hardcore, level-95 character for $US1,051.98 ($1604), deliverable within 12 days.

Musk initially fought the cheating allegations, dismissing them as theories concocted by jealous haters. When Zack Hoyt, a popular gaming streamer known as Asmongold, said Musk’s “insecure” lying marked a “truly sad day for gamers,” Musk fired back, in since-deleted posts, that he had been “on hundreds of streams … playing live with the world’s best players” and that it was Hoyt, instead, who was “NOT good at video games.”

“This is embarrassing and very silly,” Hoyt said in a video. “It makes him look bad, and it’s for absolutely no reason - it’s of no consequence, and it achieves no goal.”

Some close to Musk’s personal life rushed to his defence. Claire Boucher, the electronic musician known as Grimes and mother of three of Musk’s children, said she had personally observed his gaming accomplishments, including becoming the first American in Diablo 4 to, as a “druid,” finish an ultra-hard dungeon called Abattoir of Zir.

Then, this month, Musk - at least, partially - confessed. In messages he sent to a gaming streamer known as NikoWrex, Musk answered a question about whether he had boosted by sending a 100 percent emoji and said the top characters all “require multiple people playing the account to win a levelling race.”

In a video of the messages, which Musk reposted, the billionaire said he had “never claimed” full credit for progressing his characters and, when asked whether he wanted to apologize to gamers, responded, “What would I be apologizing” for?

The admission - and the fact that Musk was spending time chatting with small-time YouTubers as his power grew in Washington - triggered a wave of ridicule in the same forums that once marvelled at his gaming triumphs. “Living proof that someone can be rich and successful while still being a loser,” one user on a gaming-news subreddit said.

But Musk has appeared unfazed. On Sunday, he shared an X post saying he had reached No. 3 on Path of Exile’s “hardcore” leaderboard - the same character that had been seen adventuring while Musk was at Trump’s swearing-in.

“You literally paid and boosted and cheated basically to have this character and still brag about it?” one X user said in response to the post. Added another: “Why pay someone to reach a top rank? Video games are supposed to be fun.”

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