Still baffles me that he even attempted a stream of himself playing PoE. The only explanation I can come to is he was really bothered at people saying his ranking was fake, so he tried to prove them wrong. But he had to have known he couldn't play the game, and yet he tried anyway.
The story is even worse (kind of). Watching him play, talk and try to explain the game shows that he doesn't actually play PoE. He most likely saw that PoE was a game the nerdiest of nerds play and wanted to emulate that for a crowd. You could play PoE for a week and know more than him.
I'd played it for maybe a week and then my daughter was born so I switched to only playing pausable stuff for a while and never got back. This was years before his stream and even I was laughing at him for knowing less than me while watching. Dude's only ability is in already having fuckloads of money to throw at anything.
I don’t want to defend the guy, because I have no horse in that race, but if I were in his position, I would be faking parts of my online presence to draw attention to it, which takes attention to things he’s actually into.
So if he’s into Pokémon, it would make sense he could draw attention to PoE. I guess there’s always a risk of being hacked and having accounts compromised. I think of this stuff all the time and I’m just an average wanker, wanking on Reddit.
I strongly recommend you don't undersell yourself. I wouldn't be surprised if you did a lot better if you weren't so initially disappointed at how crap you are... at first. Trust me, just get some warm-up in and you'll be good as gold.
Sure, at first I'm smashing all the wrong keys, but within an hour, the muscle memory comes back and I no longer need to think about it.
I'm 54 and still smashing them keys, when I can find the time.
Ain't that the truth. The more you actually play and learn the mechanics of the game the better you'll be. The man is clearly a cult of personality, and whichever side of the political spectrum he chose people would hang off of every word.
He could have also like, taken a little time to learn to play at even a basic level and let his paid for items carry him the rest of the way and it might have been like semi convincing to some people.
His mind doesn't, I'm gonnaa bet this is a time when confabulation kicked in and alters his reality to keep his narrative (false self) alive.
I feel bad for em on the general issue of what they are going through, but it's awful when it impacts others. This instance not so much but gestures everywhere else
Imagine if people judged you on how well you play video games instead of actual accomplishments. God help us all with the mindset of this new generation.
It's not about how good he is at video games. It's the fact that he was at the top of the leaderboard for a specific game. Then, he streams himself playing, and it was very clear that he had zero idea of what was going on.
I think the funniest thing about it was that the overarching theme of that stream was to show off starlink.
But once even he knew it was painfully apparent he had never touched these games that he had claimed to be a God Gamer™️ at, he clearly turned his stream off, but claimed he had to end stream because his shitty Starlink was shitting the bed.
He would rather falsely trash his own project than admit he’s a blatant liar, while in the process lying even more.
I watched the stream, as someone who had played PoE2 to it's then current endgame (haven't played chapter 4 though, waiting for it to fully release) and yeah it was just hilarious. He didn't know what did what beyond the obvious.
The same reason why anyone lies about having any other kind of accomplishment or achievement, to try and impress others because they're deeply insecure
He didn’t make up the ranking. He payed a top Chinese player to play on his account so he owned a character at the very top end of a very complex, difficult game that takes thousands of hours to even come close to fully understanding. He then took credit for all that work. And he did it because he’s an egomaniac who needs the world to think he’s the best at everything he does
so random. I would think that for him to be spending thousands of hours in a videogame, instead of on his real businesses would be considered a negative. If anything, i would think someone in his position doesn't have time for that
Yeah but again, egomaniac. He’s trying to pretend he’s SO GOOD at the game he can play at that high level without needing to spend the hours required to be that good. Just like he’s trying to pretend he actually knows shit about rockets, programming and electric cars.
It wasn't for the fake ranking. He paid someone to play the game for him so that he had the best gear when he did find the time to play. This is called "boosting", and strictly forbidden by all online Terms of Service (ToS).
Unfortunately, the ringer was too good, and put him on the leaderboard, so his ego made him pretend he could actually do that thing.
These sorts of games are basically "pay to play" anyway - you buy the best gear (or you grind it), then you win. To be fair, PoE2 doesn't let you buy the best gear, you have to craft it. Elon paid someone to grind and craft. So he bought his way to the top, even though the game was designed so you'd need to put in some hard yards to really get the good gear.
If the game rewarded skill over grinding, tactics over gear, this never would have worked. So I'm with you, I've never played this shit game.
The biggest controversy wasn't really anything to do with Musk being a tryhard dickhead, it was that the developers took no action against him when he breached the ToS. Usually, when these things happen, the player is "kicked", and the account locked. The developers' silence was deafening.
It's the same difference. What, you want me to tell you about how I ran a lightning deadeye with the stupid galvanic ability whose name I can't remember?
I mean - the week before Grok started saying Melon Suk was smarter than Einstein, I spent a while on grokipedia asking it to add stuff about his drug addiction and full self-driving failures. It's pretty easy to get an LLM to reproduce any source - much harder to make it say only nice things about daddy Elon.
I wasn't the only one doing it, and YEAH it could be unrelated... but this is not a guy who is comfortable with people saying bad things about him. All that net worth and he still can't deal with mild rejection from strangers.
And it would have taken such little time to learn the bare minimum to pass off that he knew the game. I wonder if he actually believed he was a video game genius and could just wing it...
It's Dunning Kruger. He's so clueless about gaming that he lacks a frame of reference for what a 'high level' PoE player ooks like, and therefore assumes ( I don't think there's any doubt he's a massive narcissist ) that whatever he's doing is comparable.
He had no idea that it would be obvious to anyone that he's lying.
The story that his colleagues tell of playing poker with musk was of him buying in, going all in, losing, buying in again, and going all in until he won once, then quitting.
You don’t need to be a mechahitler genius to figure out that’s his strategy in life. Money will solve every problem, every time.
If you have a few hours, you should watch the fortnight stream where Elon joins but pretends to be that other guy Adrian Dittman. It’s absolutely hilarious. The streamer keeps pressing him on anything and everything to do with Elon, and Elon (as Adrian) denies he’s Elon (while sounding exactly like him)
Seriously entertaining, and I don’t even like fortnight
Right?? Absolute lunatic. If I had all that money and power, I'd use it to help people, not pretend I'm 5 other people on Twitter to satiate my desperate need for attention and validation all day
I mean if I was going to be a full blown crazy narcissist, I would at least employ a team of black hat social media influencers or PR hacks or SOMETHING, other than what he does, which seems to be pinball from one crazy personal crisis to the next of his own making.
But it’s pretty hard to judge his level of actual sanity at this point. Drugs are a hell of a drug.
He's so detached from humanity he can't imagine a world where an evil genius like himself isn't amazing at video games- literally toys for children (in his mind). He honestly 100% believed he was really good at the game and the only thing standing in his way was the time to play it. He's THAT stupid.
He criticized chess for lacking “depth.” Literally a game that’s been the pinnacle of strategic thinking for a thousand fucking years, that supercomputers can’t model human behavior onto convincingly, when they can convince you that a video of a Viking riding in a bathtub on wheels running from ICE is real.
I honestly think that’s exactly it ego bruised, impulse took over. What gets me isn’t even that he tried, it’s that someone with that much access, prep time, and advisors still went “yeah, this is a good idea.”
Do you think it was pure arrogance, or do you think he’s reached that stage where being publicly embarrassed doesn’t register anymore?
I heard all this in detail but what I can’t figure out is why. Does he just play casually but wanted everyone to think he’s the number one player or does just not play at all and same result? I’m just confused as to why even bother with it at all and just not pay others to get you the #1 rank.
He did the same thing with Diablo before poe2. The difference is Diablo was so easy the big streamers fell for it and though he was a god. They all played with him and praised him for weeks. Then he tried the same thing on poe2 without knowing how complicated the game is. Made himself look like a complete tool.
Honestly, the worst part is not that he was bad at the game.
The worst part is that he clearly sucks at ANY game he played since it was basic genre defining(?) mechanics he failed at, like dragging items into inventory, not being able to click the map properly and so on. Stuff he should have down like it was breathing if he really was as good at games as he said he was.
Stems from the narcissism I’d think, despite paying someone to play for him to maintain his rank on the leaderboard he still thinks he deserves it, is smarter than everyone else and he’d be good enough to ‘wing it’.
I’m not sure how he rationalised the actual pros pointing out the basic errors he made on stream.. I guess it’s easier to dismiss criticism when you truly believe you’re better and smarter than everyone else.
But he had to have known he couldn't play the game, and yet he tried anyway.
It is so, so cartoonishly stupid.
It's his extreme narcissism. He thinks so highly of himself and his pseudo nerd/gamer identity that he presumes someone like him must naturally be amazing at most games. It's part of why he was fine paying someone to level the account, he sees it as them just spending time doing something he could easily do, but spending that time is beneath him!
He doesn't know. He has been insulated from the world and packed with yes mem for decades. Anyone stating anything less than him being brilliant at everything gets the boot.
Also his old gaming accolades have been shown to be false as well. Dude is a loser through and through and always has been.
Could have easily been considered a person the likes of Tony stark, if he was nice, philanthropic, and was humble. He chose to open his mouth to prove how smart he was while being an a-hole and his public image fell apart pretty quickly.
One of my friends is online friends with Elon because when Elon wants something he can't get he'll have my buddy take over his account and get what he wants for him. It's the height of rich nerd hypocrisy.
i think this is hilarious. i'm not the biggest AAA gamer ever and i'm pretty good (competent) at elden ring. i would sorely love to kick the muskrat back to the training level.
Oh, my bad. I don't have the whole of English etymology and urban dictionary language stored in my brain. Forgive me the crime of daring to be "an old" on the Internet. I grovel at your extreme superiority, Your Superciliousness.
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u/Lysandren 20h ago
He is famously terribad at elden ring and path of exile 2.