Hello, Slate Plus listeners. It is Lizzie O'Leary. Welcome to the discourse from What Next TBD. Every episode, I sit down with smart people to talk about one big thing in the online conversation.
This is available exclusively to Slate Plus members, you lucky people. So to those of you in this very special club, which is all of you, if you're listening, thank you. This week, I am joined by one of my favorite tech reporters in the world, Drew Harwell, tech reporter at The Washington Post. Hello. Hey, Lithi. How are you? I'm great. How are you? Good, good. I mean, I sort of have no voice, but hey, it's fun. I sound like Kathleen Turner.
All right. This week, perhaps not surprisingly, has been dominated by one guy, Elon Musk, and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency, Doge. They have been moving through D.C. at a very rapid pace, with Musk talking about how he's working on the weekends to get things done, sleeping in the office, pushing for an extremely hardcore environment, much like he did at Twitter.
But we're going to talk about a different aspect of Elon Musk. Honestly, one of my favorite stories that you have ever written.
Somehow, in Elon Musk's free time, he has managed to get to the top of the leaderboards of two video games, Diablo 4 and Path of Exile 2, while also working at Doge and the various other companies he's in charge of. This is no small feat. It takes a lot of hours of grinding to get to the top. Drew, how did Elon do it?
Well, basically he cheated. The long and short. Well, you know, so Elon has played these games a lot. We know he has because he has streamed himself playing these games for many hours. And these are a special kind of video game. They're role-playing games, but they're called...
They're known kind of among gamers as dungeon crawlers. You create a character, you know, an archer or a magician or warrior, and then you go into a series of
ever increasingly challenging dungeons and swamps. You kill baddies, you get better swords, and you fight bigger baddies. So we know Elon has played a little bit, or a lot, but he's
Now, you know, at basically the global pinnacle of achievement in two of these games, which are two of the harder dungeon crawlers available. And he did that basically by boosting. Yeah, what's boosting? He paid other people to play his character for him to make it the most powerful it could be, to get him the best armor, the best helmets, the best...
swords and magic wands. So, you know, when he was not playing, he was paying some stranger around the world or maybe a group of strangers to be playing for him to get his character to the best position. So when he wanted to play, he could log into his...
and be playing like he had been playing every hour for several days just to get him to that top spot. Oh, just like it was like still going on. Yes, exactly. So it's like if you were to rate, if you were to get in like a road race with other people and we all had the same car, but then you paid for a Lamborghini. Yeah.
And then you just soared through to the finish line and were like, yeah, look how good I am. That's basically what Elon did with these games. Okay, so I am not a gamer, even though two of the producers on this show are. So I need you to, like, translate gamer to me here. How did they feel about this? It's interesting because...
A game like this, it's all about how much time you spend in it. You know, role-playing games, you start as a little munchkin and you...
devote many hours to it. And over time you get better and better. And so, you know, for Elon to kind of come in and have this top level player, this character that beats basically everybody else, it, to some people, it felt like, you know, some people even called it stolen valor, right? This idea that he was like adopting this mantle of triumph and
when he had kind of, you know, paid to skip ahead. Now, of course, there are like Elon fans who are like, who cares, right? Like this guy, you know, he's super rich. We don't care, you know? And to be fair, like this is a kind of game where it's like you versus all the monsters. So he wasn't like, you know, going out there and,
going into arenas with 12-year-olds and like smacking them down. But the fact that he, you know, got to the tops of these leaderboards, and these leaderboards are, you know, among gamers, these are pretty widely watched. The fact that he just threw money at the problem and elevated himself to this podium, that struck a lot of people as just, one, it was just kind of like,
you know, it was annoying to some people because they had sort of built in their mind that Elon was this great gamer and this was like a pretty big asterisk on it. And two, it was like, why would he do this in the first place? Why would he lie about it? You know, like, you know, some people felt like,
Like they would have understood if he had said, you know, I spent all this money. I'm busy. I just want the best character when I log in. So, you know, who cares? But he didn't do that. And he pretty notably, when he would go on these streams, he would talk about all of the stuff he had just won, right? Like, oh, my character now has this. So he was really kind of-
Like really feeding the narrative that he was not boosting. He had never come clean and said, you know, I had paid people to get me this character. And when you would listen to his streams, as I listened to many of his streams, he talked about, oh, yeah, you know, my character's got these gloves now. They're pretty good. And, you know, but they could be better. And so he was really...
acting like it was all him. And, you know, people would watch him for many hours and you would never get the sense that he was taking this pretty big shortcut to get this amazing character. ♪
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