After more than 30 years of running Activision, from 1991 to 2023, you might think that Bobby Kotick knows a thing or two about what it takes to run a successful videogame company.
He's a controversial figure, but Kotick also bought a failing company for $500,000 and turned it into a publisher that Microsoft spent $75.4 billion acquiring.
After listening to him suck up to Elon Musk on the Rushmore podcast (cheers TWIV), however, it sounds like he might have lost his strong instincts.
"Elon truly would be the best owner of any game company," he said. "No, he would. There's not a person who'd be more qualified to build and run a game company."
Musk's videogame credentials largely amount to liking videogames. He might actually be quite good at Quake and Diablo 4, too, though it's really hard to tell given his penchant for paying people to play for him.
In January, he streamed some Path of Exile 2, but seemed confused by basic game mechanics, which would have been fine if he hadn't been boasting about his skills, or if he wasn't playing on a geared-up, high-level character.
It turns out that he used an account boosting service, which he also admitted he did in Diablo 4. The 54-year-old billionaire didn't really see a problem with it, though. "It's impossible to beat the players in Asia if you don't, as they do!"
On the podcast, Musk still claimed to be "pretty good at videogames".
Musk also discussed one of his favourite videogames, Deus Ex, and once again used it to criticise the Covid lockdowns. Musk's failure to understand his favourite game has been going on for a while, and it's prompted Deus Ex writer Austin Grossman to call him out a few times.
"That kind of political weight and social satire is a real common thread between Deus Ex and Dishonored," Grossman told us. "It is the thing that Elon Musk likes, creepily. It is creepily in Elon Musk's worldview. So that may be its longest, worst legacy."
Not mentioned in the podcast was Musk's current gaming venture. Last year, he announced that xAI would develop games using AI, which he claimed would "make games great again". He said it would release an AI-generated game in 2026.
Former Sledgehammer boss Glen Schofield had a different take from Kotick, his former employer, calling Musk "full of crap" for claiming xAI could develop a game in a year.
Musk does seem to have slammed on the breaks, though. On the podcast he suggested we'd see fully AI-generated games appearing in the next three years.
Regardless, anyone who wants to cut out the humans who made all the games he loves so much, or who thinks that the truly atrocious AI tech demos we've all seen suggest that AI games will ever be anything other than hilarious mistakes, is not the kind of person who should own a game developer.
Kotick wasn't done with the flattery, though.
When Rushmore host and Endeavour CEO Ari Emanuel suggested that it was a mistake for Musk to buy Twitter, and that he should have invested in videogames instead, Kotick came to his pal's defence.
"For the betterment of society he needed to actually own X," he said. Yes, the man who let the bigots return to Twitter was doing it all for the betterment of society, and not just because he's a terminally online populist.
"No, he's way too capable," Kotick added. "The things he's working on, there are too few people in the world that actually could do that. So those are the priorities of how do you actually save humanity, improve society, he's got his priorities right."
One thing we can agree on, Bobby, is that it would be better if Musk spent more time tweeting and less time trying to ruin videogames. At least for me.
