The Saga Of Elon Musk’s ‘Path Of Exile 2’ Character Continues With Even Wilder Internet Drama

The story of Elon Musk’s Path Of Exile controversy is pretty bizarre. Musk, the wealthiest man on the planet and a major supporter of president-elect Donald Trump, often brags about his gaming prowess on X/Twitter, the social media company he acquired for $44 billion in 2022.

Musk has had a top 20 Diablo 4 account in the past, and recently raised eyebrows when he revealed that one of his Path Of Exile 2 characters was among the most powerful in the world. The eyebrows nudged a bit higher when Musk livestreamed himself playing the game, making all kinds of bizarre noob mistakes that no seasoned, experienced top-tier player would ever make.

Long story short, the Path Of Exile community and some of its content creators cast major doubts on the veracity of Musk’s claims based on his character and his gameplay. This was, indeed, a top-tier character with god-tier gear. Musk, however, played like someone who had barely dipped his toes into the game, let alone the end-game. You can watch the below video for an accessible explanation:

In a recent stream, Musk jokingly addressed accusations that he was using a Chinese player to “boost” his account, which is basically hiring a skilled gamer to get you to a high level where you can then take credit. This happens all the time in the video game landscape. There are services for lots of competitive games out there that will “boost” your rank. Say you’d like to claim to be a Top 250 Warzone player but aren’t very good. You can just hire someone to “boost” you without lifting a finger. And while you won’t gain the skills or enjoy the time it takes to actually get good, you will have bragging rights. Based on a fiction.

In the stream, which took place at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club in Florida, via Musk’s Starlink internet, players asked about the boosting. “Yes,” the Space X CEO replied. “His name is Yilongma and he’s amazing. I rely on him for everything.”

This, of course, is a joke reference to Yilongma, a Chinese internet personality who bears a bizarre resemblance to Elon Musk. Musk continues to avoid any kind of admission that he didn’t actually level up his character. A number of major influencers and streamers have called billionaire out over this, including Casual Kripp and Quin69TV and major publications like The Wall Street Journal have joined in the fray, laying out an enormous amount of evidence in the process.

When popular streamer Zack “Asmongold” Hoyt called out Musk, things took a decidedly dramatic turn. Asmongold—who has millions of followers across Twitch and YouTube—agreed with Quin69 and said that if Musk could prove that he got his character to level 97 by himself he would begin streaming on Musk’s platform, X (formerly Twitter). “I feel like it’s a universal negative for him to do this and it just makes him look like an insecure #&*#$& by doing it,” the streamer said.

Days later, the internet discovered that Musk had unfollowed Asmongold on X and Asmongold’s blue checkmark had disappeared (it has since returned). In a shocking move, Musk leaked private DMs between him and Asmongold in an attempt to cast shade at the streamer that has since backfired spectacularly (sharing private DMs is against X’s terms of service).

Musk seems to believe that Asmongold hiring editors to post his Twitch content to YouTube means those editors are the streamer’s bosses, when they are actually paid by Asmongold. More troubling is the fact that the CEO of X would leak a user’s DMs to the public.

Naturally, Asmongold took more umbrage with Musk’s claims that he is not good at video games:

Musk has yet to honestly and frankly address the boosting claims about his Path Of Exile character, but just about everybody outside of his biggest defenders and sycophants seems to agree that something is deeply fishy about the incongruences between his livestream performance and the top-tier character he claims to have created and leveled up on his own, something that would require dozens upon dozens of hours per week to achieve—on top of running multiple major companies, tweeting endlessly and working alongside the incoming Trump administration.

Elon’s Hardcore Path Of Exile 2 character, Percy_Verence, is now dead. It seems his near-perfect gear (which Musk discounted on his livestream as not being high-level enough) was not enough to save him.

All of this constitutes one of the strangest, most baffling video game controversies I’ve witnessed in my thirteen years as an entertainment and video game journalist. As one of the commenters on Quin69’s video notes: “It takes a special kind of narcissism to be on track to be the world’s first trillionaire, meddling in governments all over the world, and still be insecure enough to lie about being good at video games.”

Indeed, it strikes me as fairly obvious that just gaming for fun and streaming to his millions of followers as he learns the ropes would be far more endearing and entertaining and relatable than trying to pose as one of the world’s best gamers.

Actually, this reminds me that back in 2022 when Musk revealed his truly wacky Elden Ring character, everyone mocked him for it but I wrote a piece saying that this was gatekeeping, and that people should be allowed to play their funky, weird inefficient builds if they want to. Not everyone has to min-max or come up with the perfect meta builds to have fun. And isn’t fun the point? Who cares how good you are or how perfect your build is if you’re enjoying your time with the game. I’d rather play a badly optimized Elden Ring character than pay someone to boost me to the upper echelons of Path Of Exile 2, that’s for sure. What a timeline we live in.