This article was published on 11/5 and republished on 11/6.
In a surprise appearance on Joe Rogan’s show the day before the election, Elon Musk momentarily veered away from politics to reveal that he’s one of the top 20 Diablo 4 players in the world, a list which contains only two Americans.
I mean, really, Elon? You expect me to believe the richest guy on earth is one of the most insane Diablo 4 grinders on the planet? Come on.
But it’s true, all of it.
It’s easy to be skeptical of many Elon claims these days, but he’s being truthful about this. You can check, Elon Musk is actually the #19 Diablo 4 player in the world in terms of timed runs of Pit 150.
If you follow Elon on Twitter, in between thousands of political posts and a few rocket videos, he has indeed periodically shared videos of him playing Diablo 4 at extremely high levels. Usually he’s a Barbarian (and has been known to complain directly to Blizzard about the class needing buffs) but like everyone, he recently played Spiritborn during the Vessel of Hatred expansion, which is responsible for his current #19 ranking with a somewhat typical Quill build, but a really good one, it seems.
I’ve seen people speculate that Elon is just being carried or that he paid for a bunch of perfect loot in order to reach these heights. It’s not impossible, but there’s no evidence of that. What does remain a mystery, however, is that a guy running multiple companies including SpaceX, Tesla and Twitter (X) has time to grind what has to be dozens or even hundreds of hours of Diablo to be ranked this high if he’s not paying for boosts. Plus you know, tweeting a hundred times a day, at least. The joke is that he’s so hands-off with his companies this is how he spends all his time, but who knows.
Elon Musk has long been a gamer, previously extolling the virtues of Cyberpunk 2077, a game in which the mother of some of his children, Grimes, appears. Previously, he was mocked for showcasing what appeared to be a truly terrible Elden Ring build (see above). He recently called for a “gamer” voter block, tweeting “make video games great again!” and has retweeted several gaming “culture war” tweets about so-called woke content in a number of games, adding fuel to those movements.
Whatever else you may think of him the man is…a Diablo player, that’s for sure. He is legitimately one of the top players in the world, surprisingly not just a hyperbolic exaggeration, and we’ll see if in the wake of the election he can keep playing enough to sustain that spot.
Update: People seem very interested in Elon Musk’s Diablo 4 prowess, so it seems worth revisiting and expanding on. Since I wrote this piece yesterday, Elon Musk has been knocked out of the top 20, down to #22. #1 is currently Resistance, an American player who has the world record time by a full 12 seconds, 1:59 to 2:11 for second place. Every single build I can see in this entire hundreds-long list is Spirtborn, and also some form of a Quill Volley build, indicating that yes, one class and one build is wildly stronger than anything else right now, and Blizzard may react accordingly with future nerfs of buffs.
As for Elon, there is deep skepticism that a man running four companies with 11 kids actually has achieved this legitimately. There are talks of him being “boosted” by better players, maybe even someone using his account to make this run. But given how much we’ve seen him play, that seems doubtful, and if he’d pay for something like that, why only this game?
It is also possible to buy perfect Diablo 4 gear from sellers rather than spend hundreds of hours farming and rerolling (though enhanced items become account bound, so that’s tricky). Again, this is all speculation given that a man of his resources may find some sort of way to buy his way into a top slot, but there’s just no evidence this has happened. Maybe he really is just on that grind for a significant chunk of his daily life as this quite literally would take a few hundred hours to build your character up enough to achieve.
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