Elon's Dishonesty: A Primer for Boomers

The significance of Elon Musk's antics about his video game ventures doesn't seem to resonate with the generally older crowd on the politics board. Here are the problems with Elon's claims:

Elon isn't just claiming that he's a good player. He is claiming to be a Top 10 player in this particular game out of everyone that plays it. This is an extremely popular game that has millions of players. Not only is he making this claim, "he" IS on that Top 10 list of players that is visible to anyone that logs in the game, again out of the millions of people that play it.

So what, you stupid kids, you'll say. The thing is, in order to be ranked that high you 1) need to have no life other than sitting on your ass for 80 hours a week or 2) playing video games is your life and your income is based on streaming, RMT (selling in game items for real money) or so on. There is absolutely no other way to accomplish this, regardless of how good you are. It comes down to how much time you have to play.

It gets worse. Elon is not only lying about this accomplishment, but he actually playing that character in game demonstrates that he has paid someone else to do it for him. This is taboo in the gaming world and is referred to as "boosting." Boosters are not only the equivalent of posers/fakes in gaming, but the act of being boosted also implies that someone was pathetic enough to pay someone else to play a game for them because they couldn't do it themselves.

Lastly, in his stream, Elon was casually showing off items equipped on his character that are virtually impossible to obtain by legitimate means. In this game, items drop from enemies that are killed with randomized statistics that are the virtual equivalent of rolling five separate thousand sided dice. All ten or so of Elon's items are nearly perfectly "rolled," meaning they have the best outcomes in every statistic. This would either require the statistical probability of something like a single person winning the Mega Millions twice...consecutively. To obtain legitimately, that is. Or he is cheating.

What clearly occurred is that Elon is engaging in RMT (real money trading, remember) to buy the best of the best items for sale from other players out of the millions of people that play this game (this is actually an indirect process where real money is traded for an in game currency that is then used to buy in game items, but that's not essential to understanding what's going on here). He may be the richest person on the planet, but the amount of in game currency required for this is unobtainable through playing the game legitimately. This, like boosting, is also taboo in the gaming world for similar reasons. Not only that, but RMT is explicitly against the rules of this game. People are banned when caught.

But who cares, you little shit. Get off your cellphone and look me in the eyes, you might say. Well, I've tried to provide some insight on why gamers care, but if that means nothing to you consider this: what Elon is doing here amounts to being a liar, a cheater and a fake. If he was a professional gamer, being caught like this would be a career ending moment. This strange attempt at trying to portray himself as some sort of a gaming genius with not only fake claims, but also cheating to do it, has stained his reputation with teens and 20 year olds regardless of their political views.

That's why it matters.