How to Understand Elon Musk through Gaming

Elon Musk is uncool to a lot of nerds, and he's been angry about this fact for a very long time. This hasn't stopped his fascination with trying to be king of the hill in a subculture that he should do well in, but doesn't.

Looking around gaming and popular culture nets a lot of pastiches on evil geniuses who are rich and profound failures. In Sony's Horizon Zero Dawn and Horizon Forbidden West, robotics magnate Ted Faro comes most immediately to mind. To save my readers the many hours of gameplay, what happens is:

1. Faro makes a bunch of Robots to sell for warfare
2. He makes the Robots fueled by biomass, which means they eat living creatures
3. Faro then proceeds to hide this fact when the robots eat a pod of rare dolphins
4. Faro panics when the robots start eating humans
5. Faro funds a project to preserve humanity and maybe give future people a chance to terraform an earth overrun with Robots
6. In a temper tantrum, Faro destroys the module with all of the cultural and historical knowledge
7. Faro seals himself in a giant-ass egyptian tomb compound where his mental breakdown continues

This mostly plays out in audio and hologram logs that our protagonist, a clone of the scientist fixing most of his fuckups, discovers. Eventually, we find out that he made himself functionally immortal but then manages to piss off the doctor responsible for maintaining his cell stability into committing suicide. What happens is he turns into a mutated creature so repulsive that his descendant requests it be shot on sight.

I mean, this is entirely plausible as a sequence of events that could happen to Elon, who fritters a lot of times playing video games in federal office buildings, whining that he is good at Diablo IV, and creating some of the worst Elden Ring builds known to man.

You can get a sense of the policy mindset of these people through some of their gaming thinking. They don't check existing information or pay attention to the communities playing these games for tips, camaraderie or enjoyment. Gaming is for lording over trophies that they may or may not have earned, and they see achievements in politics the same way.

Elon and his maidenless cronies have a strong culture of work as play. Not in the sense that they can push themselves innovating constructive tools for governance and statecraft, but this sandbox gaming mindset of destruction. Data for healthcare, financial information and federal personnel practices that they do not understand is simply something to brute force through while funneling more and more funds to a barbaric, hideously engorged ICE surveillance and technological apparatus. While conducting these "efficiency" cuts, Elon took the time to, surprise surprise, throw another video game tantrum about Assassin's Creed: Shadows for having a Black samurai and a female ninja as main characters.

None of this is meant to absolve gaming as an industry, of course. It sheds jobs and pads out executive salaries in the West. Japanese gaming's crunch and work culture is toxic as well, although laws protect workers from abrupt layoffs to some extent. It is helpful, however, to see Elon as being ambitious in gamification: or adding features to his political beliefs that are game-like in nature. When he took over Twitter, he requested people print out code and judged the quantity of coding work that engineers had completed. When he began futzing around American government offices, he simply looked at the raw budgets for projects that sometimes spanned multiple years or geographical regions, alarmed at large looking numbers and requesting those projects be defunded.

It's not dissimilar to any given high school student realizing you can light your SIMs on fire and watch them scream. Unfortunately, the screaming is coming from real federal staffers and the millions of constituents using those services, and counting. I want a reset.