I do find the "everyone does it" claim interesting in the sense that studies have shown that people who really do defraud, lie, cheat, steal GREATLY over estimate how many people do it.
It's such a strange thing to make someone else play games for you and lying about it, pretending you are the gamer. Especially strange coming from one of the richest man on the planet.
Just own it, say you can play only a limited time per week, and in that time, you don't want your character to be a boring initial character.
With all that said, this is the least relevant thing he did, so don't really understand the big dramatic expose videos, either.
A big part of Elon's brand is making it look like he's a kind of autistic, nerd-prodigy. Same aesthetic that Sam Bankman-Fried played on with his cargo shorts and gaming habit. Many normies think that Elon "invented" electric vehicles or SpaceX's rockets and isn't simply a financier with a large inheritance.
I didn't think there was much debate that the Elon streams were authentic, since they were played so weirdly. The issue was that the account he was playing was way overleveled for how he was playing.
I don't know about the third parties getting in on it, I guess that's just milking what can be milked (which also makes videos longer); but I can totally see why Path of Exile players keep making memes about it.
Imagine someone saying they're a master programmer, one of the top guys ever. Then they open notepad, type something that doesn't even make sense as pseudo code, close the window, click "no" when notepad asks to save, say "as you can see it's already compiled" and click some icon that's been sitting on the desktop all the time, starting a screen saver.
Or imagine Musk claimed that he speaks Chinese perfectly and spent 20 years in China as English teacher, and proves it by having a conversation with a stooge, where Elon Musk asks "ching chong ping pong?" and the other person response in Chinese, only for Elon to repeat "ching chon ping pong". 50 times, after which the stooge thanks Elon for having given them something to think about, while his fans just stare, deeply impressed.
For people who know why that is funny, they instantly see it, and it's just too funny. But I can see how it's just a big nothingburger for people who aren't into the game.
A core part of the man that is Elon Musk is paying people to do things and taking credit for them as if he did them himself. That's like, his entire MO.
I don't think the issue is that it is video games as much as that he is willing to be so inauthentic and lie about something as mundane as how good one is at a video game
Oh, I agree he’s a lying, self-aggrandizing schmuck. I just don’t get why video game skill is so important to his image in the first place to be worth lying about.
I think it’s that he was getting undeserved credit and popularity in that community for allegedly being one of the best players in the world. It would be shocking in general for any high level executive to be a leader in a video game, but especially him given all the companies he runs. So this bought him a lot of credibility, especially when he was live streaming. But it turned out he just paid someone to build up his characters to insane levels, which was very deceptive.
I care about the dishonesty not his skill at video games. I care about the dishonesty because via his influence with Trump and at DOGE, what he thinks and does impacts me as someone living the US.
The proof being supposed confession screenshots from some youtuber with 2.9k subs who "had a chat with elon". Now busy monetizing this to the moon and beyond.
Come on. Even QZ writes: "That revelation came in DMs he seemingly exchanged with ..."
(I also believe he probably cheated somehow, but this is not the evidence.)
The evidence is his gameplay videos and it's quite conclusive. This is about an ostensible 'admission' but the admission, if it is one, is not the evidence.
I do find the "everyone does it" claim interesting in the sense that studies have shown that people who really do defraud, lie, cheat, steal GREATLY over estimate how many people do it.
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