Elon Musk admits cheating at video games, chat transcript appears to show
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Video posted by top gamer shows what he says is X conversation in which billionaire admits ‘account boosting’. Elon Musk admitted he cheated at video games to get high scores, a transcript of a private online conversation he had shows, seemingly concluding a fiery scandal over the billionaire’s outlandish claims to be a globally-ranked player.
Musk has regularly bragged about his gaming rankings. He told the podcaster Joe Rogan last year that he was in the top 20 players in the world for the fiendishly difficult action role-playing game Diablo IV. His claims have raised questions about how the world’s richest man could find time to compete internationally. He would need to have played hundreds of hours in between running businesses including Tesla Inc, X and SpaceX, as well as his growing political activity alongside Donald Trump.
Two games Musk says he has high scores in, Diablo IV and Path of Exile 2, are notoriously hard to compete in. Some players spend most of their waking hours “grinding” through dungeons and battling monsters and other fantastical creatures to make their virtual characters more powerful.
An answer to Musk’s unlikely gaming prowess was provided in a video posted on YouTube on Sunday by the top Diablo player NikoWrex, which showed what he said was a direct message conversation with Musk on X. In the conversation, Musk admits to “account boosting”, a cheating practice in which people get other players to power up their characters. This is usually done by paying them to play for hours.
