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Elon Musk has streamed and talked about Path of Exile 2 a couple of times on his socials now. The tech billionaire is outspoken about his interest in ARPGs, previously having cleared a sub-2-minute Diablo 4 Tier 150 Pit run. His gamer credentials in Path of Exile 2 include having completed pinnacle content multiple times, including once on a live Starlink stream from his private jet.
Elon's latest claim to gamer fame is taking the top 15th spot on the Path of Exile 2 hardcore leaderboards. Only, after a new stream on January 7 demonstrating some gameplay on this character, many players including multiple renowned ARPG streamers are finding that his boasting rights are unearned.
His Hardcore Monk character might just be savoring the fruits of someone else's labor.
Elon Musk's streams have telltale signs of outside help in Path of Exile 2
Before we get to the latest round of suspicious signs, here's a summary of the past accusations from a few weeks ago. Elon Musk first streamed Path of Exile 2 on X on December 18, 2024, 10 days after the game's Early Access went live.
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The 25-minute stream was a live demonstration of his mastery over the game, as he tackled Arbiters of Ash, the hardest pinnacle content in Path of Exile 2 at the time of writing.
For reference, the lead-up to this boss for a single attempt requires obtaining Crisis Fragments from Citadels, a process so tedious and time-intensive that it has spawned multiple conspiracy theories. Elon Musk had multiple full Crisis Fragment sets collected within the first 10 days of the game, which implies an incredible amount of grind that can take hundreds of hours for the average player.
Redditor Fraggu also brought to light some interesting tidbits about the stream in an exposé on Reddit. Barring some mechanical gaffes on Elon's gameplay against boss mechanics, the most damning bit of evidence is the account's link to the Hong Kong realm.
Despite Elon playing the game on the US (Texas) realm on stream, a follow-up investigation by the Redditor revealed trade messages and at least one Stash tab name in Chinese, which alleges a second party to be progressing Elon's account from the Hong Kong client of the game.
Path of Exile 2 streamers Quin and Kripp point out suspicious signs of inexperience in Elon's latest stream
Coming back to the more recent X stream on January 7, Elon Musk's gameplay has signs of inexperience that slip through, as discovered by popular ARPG streamer Quin69. Reacting to the VOD of the new stream, which features some T15+ mapping gameplay, Quin spotted a few actions that may feel very suspicious at the hands of Elon relative to the amount of game knowledge he claims to have.
This time around, Elon Musk's character is yet another Tempest Flurry Monk playing "max difficulty on Hardcore" (in his own words). Getting a character to lvl 96 on Hardcore is no joke, and it would imply a level of muscle memory and familiarity with the moment-to-moment gameplay that a casual player will not have.
The stream did not exude the type of spotless gameplay one would expect from someone so well-versed with T15 mapping and pinnacle content. To summarize some pointers brought up by Quin, and later Kripparian, who reacted to the reaction video after the fact:
- Elon Musk, despite reaching T15+ endgame, does not use a loot filter.
- One of the tabs is named "Elon's map", which is either highly suspicious or highly hilarious.
- He attempted to click on a juiced map node that had not been unlocked yet.
- Low transparency setting on minimap, considered one of the cardinal sins of high-level Path of Exile mapping.
- He went into a map with an almost-full inventory.
- Mapping in a Crypt node, he left a Chaos Orb on the ground, something that even a mid-campaign player would have picked up instinctively.
- He cleared a Breach very inefficiently, ignoring the other sides of the Breach periphery to farm it properly.
- He picked up loot from a map boss in the slowest way possible: opening his inventory and dragging multiple items from the ground into it manually.
One could claim these omissions and micro-mistakes are immaterial, given how currency-rich and fully kitted out Elon Musk is on his HOWA-Tempest Flurry Invoker. The simple counter-argument to that is the sheer number of hours he has personally spent playing the game if any or all of his claims were true.
On Hardcore alone, Elon Musk's account Random9#2886 (data set to private) has two registered Monk characters on the Path of Exile 2 Hardcore ladder — the recently deceased Kekius Maximus, and the latest Percy_Vance. To get to over lvl 90 on both of these would take hundreds if not thousands of hours, which is quite a lot of hours within a few weeks after release.
Even discounting the softcore characters (such as the MonkeBiznizz character that he streamed his Arbiter runs on), if he did clock in this many hours in mapping, it's highly irregular for his gameplay to feature these clumsy micro-inefficiencies.
The final nail in the coffin: Elon's Ivory-tower comment on his gear and only "lvl 52" HOWA
If the gameplay and evidence of account-outsourcing were not proof enough, the way Elon Musk went over his character's gear near the end of the stream is quite telling. As he skimmed over the Hands of Wisdom and Action on his inventory, he despondently pin-pointed "level 52 here...", highlighting the discrepancy between the glove's level and his character's level.
To explain the big red flag here, Hands of Wisdom and Action (colloquially called HOWA) is the single-biggest build-defining pair of Unique gloves in Path of Exile 2 for a lightning-damage Monk. To point out its level (which, in fact, happens to be the highest possible level of that unique) is doing it a major disservice and displays unfamiliarity with the crux of endgame gearing optimization.
For someone who claims to have high enough APM to trip up the game's macro monitoring system and get kicked from the session, these compounding shreds of evidence of piloted account usage do not bode well. Recently, a Path of Exile 2 player has also taken to Steam forums demanding to ban the tech billionaire's main account based on a ToS breach with account outsourcing and third-party piloting.
