The Musklash

What's happening to Elon Musk?

Greetings from Read Max HQ! In this week’s newsletter, a discussion of recent criticism Elon Musk has received from the gaming community, and how it affects his political prospects.

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It’s been a bad week for Elon Musk, to the extent that any week can be bad when you have a net worth of $435 billion. He lost a SpaceX spacecraft over the Gulf of Mexico. The SEC is suing him for not disclosing his purchase of Twitter shares. And--maybe worst of all--he lost the trust of The Gaming Community:

The reckoning between Musk and gamers has been a long time coming. For years now Musk has claimed, dubiously, to have been among the best players in the world at a variety of time-consuming games--Quake, Elden Ring, and Diablo IV--despite the fact that he is also running multiple businesses, raising multiple children, impregnating multiple employees, tweeting “looking into it” at multiple guys complaining that Twitter has too many Jews on it, etc. It’s been obvious that Musk isn’t actually playing, e.g., Diablo IV himself, and instead has hired professionals to grind on “his” accounts so he looks good, but streamers and gamers and other types of people whom you might assume would care about this stuff have extended him the benefit of the doubt, presumably out of some sense of annoying-nerd solidarity.

Recently, however, he’s taken this fiction too far. Musk has been claiming to be one of the world’s top players of the new and notoriously arduous RPG Path of Exile 2--which, as we know, is par for the course for him. But where previously he’d simply make the claim and share his account to verify his level, this time he live-streamed himself playing and was so incredibly bad that no reasonable person could possibly believe that he himself had played the game very much at all, and no one could extend a generous reading of his previous claims.

If you want the specific details of his mistakes, they’ve been amassed on Reddit: He “does not seem to know to use a mana flask when out of mana”; he “picks up items by dragging them into his inventory manually”; he “implies the Hand of Wisdom and Action unique could be a higher level than 52.” Can you imagine? For further explanaiton, the New Zealand streamer Quin69TV has maybe the definitive tape investigation:

Needlessly to say, it’s already extremely embarrassing for the world’s wealthiest man to be caught at age 53 in the kind of weird lie that most people haven’t encountered since they were 11. But rather than gracefully disentangle himself from the lie with some kind of face-saving excuse that streamers and other gaming influencers--among the people probably most predisposed to thinking highly Elon Musk--would accept, Musk has, characteristically, decided to pick a misguided fight with the extremely popular streamer Asmongold:

“Asmon behaves like a maverick ‘independent’, but in reality has to ask his boss for permission before he can do anything. He is not his own man.”

It wasn’t clear what Musk was referring to, until Musk leaked private DMs between himself and Asmon, in which Asmon refers to his “editors” on YouTube.

Like many Twitch streamers, Asmongold also has a YouTube channel that posts shorter, edited clips of his streams. The editing is done by others, and the revenue from the channel is shared between them.

Elon Musk appears to have misunderstood the role of a YouTube editor, and presumed that editor translated to a journalistic editor who decides what kind of stories a publication should cover.

Implying that the Hand of Wisdom and Action unique could be a higher level than 52 is bad enough--but there is no bigger sign of being a fake gamer girl in 2025 than not knowing how the business side of YouTube works.

There is something particularly funny about the world’s most prominent and successful weird reactionary nerd managing to be so weird that he alienates gamers, and there are few people more embarrassing to lose an argument with than Asmongold, a man known to stream while roaches climb over him. But “gamers” are far from the only Musk-friendly community to have recently turned on him. Over the holidays, Musk’s stance in favor of H-1B visas for skilled immigrants earned him the enmity of Laura Loomer and the other MAGA nationalist freaks with whom he’d joined forces to promote Trump. Musk quickly pivoted to promoting right-wing European nationalists like Tommy Robinson and Alice Weidel, but it hasn’t sufficiently smoothed over the rift, and hard right X influencers are continuing to accuse Musk of censorship.

You might expect that, in defending H-1Bs, Musk might’ve shored up his popularity among tech executives--but even Musk’s more traditional and reputable elite base in Silicon Valley is showing signs of exhaustion with his antics. The rationalist author and podcaster Sam Harris, a prominent and credible figure in the broad “tech-adjacent anti-woke” internet universe, wrote a Substack this week outlining how he and Musk fell out as friends:

Elon bet me $1 million dollars (to be given to charity) against a bottle of fancy tequila ($1000) that we wouldn’t see as many as 35,000 cases of Covid in the United States (cases, not deaths). […] A few weeks later, when the CDC website finally reported 35,000 deaths from Covid in the U.S. and 600,000 cases, I sent Elon the following text:

Is (35,000 deaths + 600,000 cases) > 35,000 cases?

[…] Elon never responded, and it was not long before he began maligning me on Twitter for a variety of imaginary offenses. […] Everyone close to Elon must recognize how unethical he has become, and yet they remain silent. […]

A final absurdity in my case, is that several of the controversial issues that Elon has hurled himself at of late—and even attacked me over—are ones we agree about. We seem to be in near total alignment on immigration and the problems at the southern border of the U.S. We also share the same concerns about what he calls “the woke mind virus.” And we fully agree about the manifest evil of the so-called “grooming-gangs scandal” in the U.K. The problem with Elon, is that he makes no effort to get his facts straight when discussing any of these topics, and he regularly promotes lies and conspiracy theories manufactured by known bad actors, at scale. (And if grooming were really one of his concerns, it’s strange that he couldn’t find anything wrong with Matt Gaetz.)

And Paul Graham, a widely read and respected tech investor, expressed some gentle concern over Musk’s reputation and was met with a typically unhinged response from the man himself¹:

Musk’s increasing unpopularity doesn’t mean much for his individual wealth and power. He’s not an elected politician who needs to count votes, and one of the nice things about being the wealthiest man in the world--especially when so much of that wealth is tied up in ownership of stocks of companies that you run and control--is that you are, personally, effectively Too Big To Fail. But I’d suggest that the dissatisfaction he’s suddenly facing from previously friendly quarters is reflective of broader, increasingly visible fissures in the coalition that brought Trump to victory last year.

It’s not an accident, I don’t think, that three groups currently pissed off at Musk are effectively standard-bearers for three pillars of the Trump coalition: business wealth, with tech as its leading fraction (represented here by Harris and Graham); nationalist MAGA conservatives (represented here by Loomer and company); and low-propensity voters who spend too much time on their phones (represented by Asmongold and “gamers”). While these groups broadly agree on certain issues (arrest all homeless people, send a DEVGRU wetwork team to execute the “Gen Z boss and a mini” girls, bring back booby video-game women), there are obvious rifts.

There was, of course, the brief Twitter war over H-1B visas in December, which pitted tech wealth against the nationalists (and, to a lesser extent, the low-propensity voter types). More recently, the NEET doomer wing of the low-propensity voter has picked a fight over job and economic prospects with the right-wing activist Chris Rufo, whose fusionist project places him right at the intersection of big business and social conservatism. And on it goes: Soon, I’m sure, we’ll see the tech industry and the low-propensity voters align against MAGA Republicans for a week or two on Twitter.

Trump, a tremendously gifted politician, is adept at avoiding the consequences of such a fractious coalition less by any particularly cunning design and more through sheer force of personality and derangement. But Musk, who has metonymized himself to the Trump administration, lacks even a small fraction of Trump’s natural political talent, and easily becomes a natural target for the frustrations and dissatisfactions of each faction. As I’ve said, I don’t think the rolling backlash against him will have a meaningful effect on his fortune (or, downstream from that, his power), but I do think it will be rough on a guy who is so transparent about his need for approval. Now that guys like Musk have convinced themselves that criticism from the media and woke SJWs pushed them to the right, where do they go when the right starts complaining about them, too?

1. As a side note, in the thread of replies to Graham, Elon partakes in a weird new trend in rich tech guys fighting online: “tweeting long A.I.-generated ‘parody’ scripts or articles about their opps.” “Wow, I can’t believe Paul G wrote this hit piece about me! How will I ever recover? 😢,” Musk tweets, before dumping a long fake parody op-ed column; meanwhile, Marc Andreessen has been publishing lengthy parody “interview transcripts” featuring Taylor Lorenz for some reason. Sometimes all you can do is marvel at the new frontiers of wackness being explored by these guys.