‘It’s pathetic,” my son said to me earlier this year. “How can anybody be that insecure?”
He had just finished explaining to me the strange story of Elon Musk and Path of Exile 2. It’s a tale that has much to say about where the world finds itself in 2025.
Last December, Musk posted a screenshot on X revealing he had been disconnected from Path of Exile 2 – an online RPG (role-play game) created by Grinding Gear Games in West Auckland, New Zealand – after triggering one of its anti-cheating systems. “You have been kicked for performing too many actions too fast,” read the message on his game screen. “Wasn’t even using a macro, lol,” Musk chirped in the post.
The implication – eagerly embraced by fans whose replies clamour for approval under his incessant posts – was that Musk’s gaming skill was so superhuman that the game’s systems had assumed he must be a computer. He later revealed that the character he played in the game was one of the highest-ranked in the world. Many gamers weren’t so sure. Grinding Gear steadfastly refused any comment.
Bizarrely, Musk then live-streamed himself playing Path of Exile 2 – and (I’ll spare you the incomprehensible details) voluntarily revealed himself to be a clueless noob. Whoever had been playing Musk’s account at elite levels evidently wasn’t him, and it was probably someone he had paid. Musk eventually admitted as much in an interview with a gaming YouTuber: “It’s impossible to beat players in Asia if you don’t.” When he was asked if he would apologise to the Path of Exile playing community, he responded “What would I be apologising for?”
The picture of Musk as an unabashed fake stands in contrast to the one his fans hold close: that of a billionaire super-genius in the mould of Marvel Comics’ Tony Stark. (Robert Downey Jr, who played Stark in the Iron Man films, credited Musk, with whom he became friends, as the inspiration for his performance.) But the former image is increasingly the one being held up by technology reporters.
The tech press, so often regarded as the unserious child in the journalism family, is on a roll. Wired magazine, which launched in print in 1993 as an obsessively optimistic, libertarian bible for the internet age, has entered 2025 as the chief prosecutor of Elon Musk. Its reporters have broken a stream of stories about Musk’s Doge (Department of Government Efficiency) and its team of 20-something coders. In a piece headed “The incompetence of Doge is a feature, not a bug”, Wired executive editor Brian Barrett declared: “Elon Musk is the undisputed champion of making money for Elon Musk. As effectively the CEO of the United States of America? Very bad. Embarrassing, honestly.”
The billionaire owners of Condé Nast, which bought Wired in 1998 and its website in 2006, had a 10-fold accleration in subscription growth, largely as a result of stories about Doge. Lesser-known tech publications have also prospered. 404 Media, founded and owned by a group of refugees from Vice Media, was hailed last year by The Financial Times as a start-up star amid media’s “existential crisis”. This year, its headlines have included: “Elon Musk’s Waste.gov is just a WordPress theme placeholder page”.
This isn’t without precedent: an unglamorous industry paper, Computer Weekly, broke stories about Britain’s Post Office scandal, years before the story gained mainstream traction.
As a former tech writer, I would venture that we detect bullshit readily because we are exposed to so much of it – and, let’s be honest – most of us have been complicit at some point in selling it. When you’ve been through a few hype cycles, you know what they look like. As I write, 404 Media’s lead story rejoices in the headline “AI slop is a brute force attack on the algorithms that control reality”. It’s a hell of a read.
