Why we should all game-shame Elon Musk

The two words that should spring to mind right about now, and which show that Musk may be losing some crucial ground with a constituency he could once rely on are: git gud. I am not, for the avoidance of doubt, having a stroke. Look, I’ll explain. 

Last Saturday, before his big bust-up with tariff idiot Peter Navarro, the clown prince of the White House appeared on a livestream, playing action role-playing game Path of Exile 2. As you may know, Musk usually prides himself on being a good – nay, excellent – gamer. What a shock it was, then, for streamers to watch him try and fight the game’s very first boss and die again, and again, and again. 

Sick of embarrassing himself and being rinsed by more or less everyone watching, he ended up rage-quitting after half an hour, and that was the end of that. To say it was mortifying for him would be an understatement. Musk had, for some time, claimed that he was one of the world’s top players of PoE 2, but gamers realised earlier this year that something was afoot.

In the end, he was forced to admit that, yes, he’d hired some people to level up his characters while playing on his account, so he could pretend to be more proficient at the game that he’d let on. Elon Musk is, should you need a reminder, 53 years old. It would be easy to spend the rest of this column making fun of him for having done this, but it feels worth looking at the demographic he’s chosen to betray instead.

If you’re not a gamer, the one thing you should understand about them – well, us – as a community is that meritocracy reigns supreme. It always has, and probably always will. 

There is something of the great unifier about video games, in that gaming doesn’t care about what you look or sound like, or where you live, or how old you are. All that matters is how good you are at playing whatever game you’ve chosen as your poison.

I am, for the avoidance of doubt, not exactly defending it as a culture. It can often feel quite thankless, obnoxious and idiosyncratic. That’s where “git gud” comes from, by the way. 

Anyone who’s ever struggled with a level or a boss in a game and turned to forums for advice and answers will have encountered it. Someone else will, at some point, have asked a similar question and been hit with the two-word answer. How do I beat this seemingly unbeatable villain? Easy: get good. 

You may find this attitude childish, and you may well be right, but that’s not quite the point. The point here is that gamers, male ones especially, had long respected and loved Elon Musk, but the tide may now be turning. Explaining you’re a busy and powerful man who just doesn’t have time to also be a master gamer is one thing; lying about being great, being found out, then showing yourself up in public is quite another.

Oh, and it should go without saying that Musk’s association with an administration whose tariffs have delayed the release of Nintendo’s much-anticipated Switch 2 won’t be doing him any favours either. That the console’s price tag will now be dearer in the US than it was ever going to be is sure to draw the ire of many of these gamers.

Will this matter in the long run? Perhaps, perhaps not. What we do know is that Gamergate was, in a way, the beginning of the end for the glory days of the internet, and the cultural power of gamers cannot be underestimated. A lot of them are, by definition, very online, and it wouldn’t take much of a mood change for them to alter the way even reactionary social media users feel about Musk and his ilk.

Even if none of that does happen in the end, we can still bask in the glory of the Tesla Twat having made a complete tit of himself in front of the very people he’s always desperate to impress. Doesn’t that put a spring in your step?