Elon Musk says he's one of the world's 'top 20' Diablo 4 players, still reckons he was a Quake all-time great even after its actual best player said he 'wasn't very good'
When he's not being sued by Blade Runner, fantasising about using the steel grip of autocracy to gut the government, or admitting his promised self-driving cars may not ever drive themselves at all, Elon Musk is—god help us—a gamer. In fact, you can catch him over at his alt account on X that he set up specifically to share clips and streams of his game sessions, which the 53-year-old father of 12 named cyb3rgam3r420.
That paragraph does more psychic damage than we usually pack into entire articles, but I'm so sorry, there's more! Musk's current videogame obsession is none other than Diablo 4, which was one of the first games he streamed in his ongoing mission to turn X into a Twitch killer last year. He is, apparently, pretty good at it too. In a recent appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, Rogan asked Musk if he was "in the top 20 in the world, in Diablo?"
After a moment's hesitation, Musk confessed that he was. In fact, he's one of "only two Americans" in the top 20 on Diablo's leaderboards: himself and a player named Resistance, who's the current number 1. I say Diablo's leaderboards, we're really talking about the Diablo 4 Pit leaderboard hosted over at Helltides, which tracks how quickly its participants can blaze through the game's super-difficult endgame Pit dungeon based on user-submitted entries.
Which is still an achievement, don't get me wrong, but there's always a chance there's some super-Pit-player out there who just never got around to submitting their run to Helltides. After all, there are 697 entries on the leaderboard right now, and thousands upon thousands of Diablo 4 players.
Either way, Musk is definitely not bad at Diablo 4, where his recent 2:45, max-tier (difficulty, more or less) run through the Pit has earned him the 19th spot on the Helltides leaderboard. Musk was playing a Spiritborn, which is probably D4's most overpowered class right now, but then so was the entirety of the top 400, so it's not like he had an unfair advantage.
He's separated by a whisper from the number 20 spot: a Taiwanese player, whose name apparently translates to "Big Thief—Please register for free health clinic consultation," who has a time of 2:46. Musk is just listed as "Elon Musk," which is disappointingly prosaic by comparison. For context, the current number 1 time is a brisk 1:59, so Musk definitely has some catching up to do before he can hit that peak. That's if Blizzard doesn't nerf the Spiritborn first.
The last time Musk was on Rogan's show, he claimed he was previously one of the world's best Quake players, a claim which was then thrown into doubt by Quake's actual best player, Dennis "Thresh" Fong, coming out and saying Musk "wasn't very good" although he's "still an OG." Not one to be dissuaded, Musk repeated his claim to Quake greatness in this episode of the podcast too, seemingly oblivious to Fong's comments.
Musk told Rogan that he uses games as a form of meditation. "If I play a videogame on extreme difficulty then I have to concentrate fully on the game, and it has a calming effect, it sort of chills down." Either way, it definitely seems like Musk is a lot better at Diablo than he was at Elden Ring, or even than he was at Quake, no matter what he says.