As we've reported previously, despite holding executive roles in multiple major corporations and undertaking the busy work of burrowing himself in incoming political regimes, Elon Musk manages to find time to boast some impressive gaming laurels, claiming to hold high placements in Diablo 4 leaderboards and Path of Exile 2 hardcore league rankings. This week, those claims are being called into doubt, as PoE 2 streamers and subreddit sleuths analyze a recent stream in which Musk seemed to fumble over basic gameplay mechanics.
On January 7, Musk streamed an hour and a half of Path of Exile 2 gameplay on his current level 95 hardcore character. In PoE 2, surviving into higher levels in the hardcore league, regardless of ladder placement, is an impressive feat: As you progress, the game stacks layers of enemy modifiers, damage resistance reductions, and hazardous tileset modifiers, and dying once in hardcore means your character is toast. Getting a hardcore character into the 80s is impressive; getting one high enough into the 90s to place high on the hardcore ladder is a feat of skilled gameplay and buildcraft.
The gameplay on display in viewer-recorded VODs of the stream, however, is… well, not that.
Odd signs begin appearing as early as 18 minutes into the stream, when Musk enters his character's stash to reveal a tab that's been named "Elon's map." Considering the other tabs aren't labeled "Elon's currency" or "Elon's catalysts," the tab sticks out. Someone of a conspiratorial persuasion might see it as an indicator that, perhaps, another individual had curated the tab's selection of map-generating waystones for ease of gameplay—like if you wanted to be able to show off your high level character without a real risk of getting it killed.
At times, Musk clicks impotently at nodes on his Atlas map, seemingly struggling to identify which he can actually run despite having theoretically cleared the hundreds—if not thousands—of maps necessary for his character's level and gear. Later, when weighing which map to clear next, he selects a node with four modifiers. "There are four things here," he notes, which technically isn't untrue.
He enters maps with a full inventory, then repeatedly attempts to pick up items without inventory space. He doesn't have a loot filter active, but can be seen clicking and dragging items into his inventory—a maddening display that would imply he'd have manually sorted through thousands of dropped items to assemble his character's equipment, which could very well have taken longer than the actual gameplay necessary to reach his current level.
What's most damning, however, is that Musk seems to show a fundamental misunderstanding of how itemization in Path of Exile 2 works. Late in the stream, he looks over his current equipment. Inspecting his weapon, he says it's "only level 62" compared to his level 95 character. In doing so, he's seemingly unaware that in PoE, an item's effectiveness isn't determined by its level requirement, but by its item level—a separate figure that determines which affixes the item can roll with.
