On Saturday Elon Musk sat in his personal jet and tested out Starlink’s in-air WiFI by streaming some Path of Exile 2. Less than five minutes into the stream, someone in game chat asked him to “jerk off mr trump so he dies of a heart attack!” For the next hour and 40 minutes, the world’s richest man frowned his way through a livestream while people yelled at him.
Path of Exile 2 is an action role-playing game and Musk loves it, but he’s terrible at it. He has claimed he’s one of the top players in the world and later admitted he’s paid people to help keep his account leveled up and full of the high-end gear it needs to play the game at the highest level.
Over the weekend, in his jet, he was playing the game in hard core mode. When a player dies in this mode they cannot progress any further. Essentially, players have one life. Musk died a lot. The stream’s entire vibe was fucked. This is the richest man in the world sitting in a private jet playing a game by himself for an audience of strangers while techno music blasted through the speakers. Streaming on a platform he owns using technology he owns in a jet he owns, he sat stone-faced and grinded his way through the early portions of Path of Exile 2 while other players yelled at him.
“Elon. It’s me, Ashley St. Claire. I have no other means of contacting you so I bought PoE2 early access. Please pay your child support. Thank you Elon,” an account named YakubsWorstCreation spammed. The message was a reference to Musk’s newest (disputed) child.
Some of the messages were supportive. One encouraged people to “Buy TSLA.” Another mentioned Musk’s deployment of Starlinks to storm ravaged areas in the Carolinas after Hurricane Helene. “By the way, thank you for helping out Western NC with the starlinks, we really appreciate it,” it said.
There were a lot of references to Kekius Maximus, Musk’s Roman emperor aesthetic Pepe the Frog persona that’s steeped in washed out 2016 online culture. “Your Imperial subjects demand an audience,” one DM said.
But a lot of the messages, especially those that were spammed, were trolls. “ELON ARE YOU A SMART FELLA OR A FART SMELLA,” one asked.
Among the juvenile jokes were more personal attacks. The account “ELON_MUSK_IS_A_PEDOPHILE” spammed Musk with the message “YOU HAVE NO REAL FRIENDS AND WILL DIE ALONE.”
An account called ELON_MUSK_IS_PATHETIC sent messages several times. “STILL NOT OVER GRIMES SHE NEVER LOVED YOU,” the account spammed at a stoic Musk.
It’s possible to hide the chat in PoE2. Several times on the stream, Musk’s watchers spammed the /dnd or “Do Not Disturb” command at him in a misguided attempt to help save the billionaire from seeming a constant stream of hateful messages.
But Musk never typed /dnd. He did not stem the flow of weird hate. He did, on occasion, silence individual accounts. But it’s hard to tell what the criteria is. At about 20 minutes in he muted the account “HC_John_Wick” after it spammed “ELON HOW IS IT POSSIBLE TO LOOK THIS DUMB AND UGLY WHY IS UR TESLA COMPANY FALLING APART AHAAHAAHAAH! WHAT HAPPENED BUDDY?”
ELON_MUSK_IS_PATHETIC returned several times before Musk finally silenced it. “YOU WILL ALWAYS FEEL INSECURE IT WILL NEVER GO AWAY,” it spammed. “YOU RUINED THE COUNTRY JUST LIKE YOU RUINED ALL YOUR MARRIAGES,” it said 2 minutes later.
“Anyone spamming the chat will get, uh, ignored,” Musk said as he finally muted the account that had been harassing him for almost an hour.
The day after the stream, the internet picked it apart for content. A post with screenshots of some of the funniest DMs went viral on BlueSky. Among the PoE2 community, dissecting Musk’s gameplay and making fun of it is a cottage industry. Quin69TV is a pioneer of the form and already has a 30 minute long video breaking down how much Musk sucks at the game.
At about an hour in the stream, we saw Musk’s login screen and a list of his individual characters and their names. His level 46 amazon is “AMAZON_DOT_COM_.” A level 75 invoker is “BeLessDumb.” His level 7 monk is “DOESNTMATTERANYWAY.” Another invoker he’s got at level 100 is “FatalismFTW.”
