Elon Musk Comes Clean, Admits To Having “Multiple People” Playing On His Top Ranked ‘Diablo IV’ And ‘Path Of Exile 2’ Accounts
After spending the last two weeks defending his supposed video game skills and personally attacking those who doubted him, Tesla CEO Elon Musk has finally come clean and admitted that his placement among the top players in Path of Exile 2 (and, though no one was really questioning it, his success in Diablo IV) was only made possible thanks to “multiple people” playing on his account.
As previously reported, Musk’s video game-related controversy first kicked off when, during his January 7th livestream of Grinding Gear Games’ latest title day, veteran Path of Exile players noticed that despite his account being among the top ten highest ranked in the entire world, he seemed to be shockingly unfamiliar with the game and its mechanics.
Further questions were raised by the fact that, as explained by streamer QuinTV in his recap of the situation, the game’s leveling system was designed in such a way as to require a player to spend pretty much all of their time exploring its dungeons in order to come even remotely close to Musk’s level, and yet the tech CEO was able to do find the time to do so in between his SpaceX, Tesla, Twitter/X, and DOGE-related work.
Eventually, the controversy would reach the attention of popular Twitch streamer Zack ‘Asmongold’ Hoyt, who after watching QuinTV’s above video opined to his own followers, “So the question is, did Elon Musk play this account to level 97? The answer is very simple: No.”
So confident was Asmongold of this fact that he even issued a direct challenge on the issue to Musk, declaring during a January 12th livestream that if he could “prove that he played this account to 97,” then the streamer would multicast his show “on X starting the day that he proves it for an entire year straight.”
“I think that we deserve, if he wants an apology, if you really played the game, play through the campaign again,” said Asmongold. “Play through the campaign again, explain the systems in the game, and do it live, and you’ve gotta have a face cam. You gotta do it. You did it before with Diablo. Diablo is not so hard, right? But yeah, stream it. You gotta stream the whole thing. And not on X. And tell me ahead of time so I can react to it.”
However, instead of stepping up to the plate and proving his critics wrong, Musk instead responded to Asmongold’s challenge with insults.
Replying to a January 16th tweet from streamer ScreamheartTV in which he defended Musk’s Path of Exile 2 prowess simply due to his past success in the functionally-and-mechanically different Diablo IV, the SpaceX boss declared, “Asmon behaves like a maverick ‘independent’, but in reality has to ask his boss for permission before he can do anything. He is not his own man.”
Subsequently revealing via leaked DMs that his claims regarding Asmongold being ‘owned’ were based on his own misunderstanding of how YouTube editors work rather than any actual evidence, Musk would ultimately assert, “I’m on hundreds of streams on YouTube/Twitch playing live with the world’s best players. No other way to say this, but, while Asmon IS good at caustic commentary and making fun of people, he is NOT good at video games.”
But in a classic case of ‘the gentleman doth protest too much‘, despite his aggressive denials, Musk would eventually admit to YouTuber NikoWrex that he was not the sole player responsible for operating his Path of Exile 2 account – or, as he would reveal completely unprompted, his Diablo IV account.
Per messages exchanged between the two on January 18th and shared with the public later that same day by NikoWrex, when asked directly by the YouTuber if he had ever “level boosted (had someone else play your accounts) and/or purchased gear/resources for PoE2 and Diablo IV?”, Musk reacted to his question with a ‘100’ emoji and exclaimed “It’s impossible to beat the players in Asia if you don’t, as they do!”
From there, NikoWrex would ask Musk if “regarding PoE2, was it your intention to take full credit for leveling your [hardcore] characters?”, to which he would reply, “No. Never claimed that.”
“The top accounts in Diablo or PoE require multiple playing the account to win a leveling race,” he justified of his actions.
(Notably, while Musk never explicitly said the words ‘I personally leveled up these characters’ or any variant thereof, that he publicly used the account without noting he had any help and then also proceed to publicly deny the fact when called out shows that he was, at the very least, ‘taking credit by omission’.)
From there, NikoWrex took a moment to press Musk on “the Asmon drama”, asking him, “Was it just a misunderstanding of what an ‘editor’ is in relation to content creation?”
Doubling down on his attacks – a particularly baffling move given that he just admitted that his critics, from Asmongold to QuinTV, were correct in their reads that he did not level up his account – Musk asserted, “Asmon seemed to require permission from others to stream on X, suggesting he doesn’t control his own destiny.”
“Whether those are the editors or others, I don’t know,” he asserted.
And in confirming that he is essentially just handed the keys to these accounts after others do the hard work of leveling it up, after admitting that even his Diablo IV success was not entirely his own, Musk ultimately argued that his accomplishments in the isometric dungeon-crawler were still impressive because “very few players achieved a sub 3 min T150 clear, despite being at max level. And I haven’t seen anyone else post a sub 2 min clear, apart from [a player by the name of] Resistance.”
“No matter how you cut it, a sub 2 min clear of the hardest level in Diablo is very fast,” he continued to defend himself. “My run is posted to X. Very few mistakes were made.”
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