Elon Musk isn’t only the best in the world at building electric cars, sending rockets to space, digging tunnels and creating brain-human interfaces, but it turns out he’s world-class at video games as well.
Elon Musk says he’s ranked in the top 20 in the world at video game Diablo-4. He made the revelation on the Joe Rogan podcast, and said he’s only of only two Americans in the top 20. Diablo-4 is a role-playing computer game in which a hero must use weapons and magic to kill demons and other undead to complete their missions.
Musk’s ranking is based on “Pit-runs” in Diablo-4, which is a part of the overall game. Users can submit their “pit-runs” to a website, where they are vetted and ranked. Musk is currently ranked number 19 in the world, and his name appears as “Elon Musk” on the list, with the US flag next to it. Most of the other gamers in the list are from China and other Asian countries.
Musk went on to speak about how playing video games helps him in his day job of being an entrepreneur, who also happens to be the richest man in the world. “If I play a video game on extreme difficulty, then I have to concentrate fully on the game. It has a calming effect. It sort of chills down. Anything that forces you to concentrate fully has a calming effect — a kind of a mental restoring effect,” Musk said.
Musk also said that he believed that being good at video games translated into other fields. “If somebody was ever good at video games, I’d say like, their surgical skills can be very good because in order to be good at video games, any kind of fast reaction video games, (you need those skills). If someone were a surgeon and top-ranked video player, I’d say (that’s a good thing),” he said.
Musk’s many jobs don’t require manual dexterity like surgeons do, but it boggles the mind as to how he finds the time to not only play video games, but also be among the best at the world at them. Musk is currently running Tesla, one of the world’s most valuable companies, and SpaceX, which is pioneering space exploration with a goal of taking humans to Mars. He’s also simultaneously running Neuralink, whose brain implants have given the ability to paralysed people to operate computers with their minds. Meanwhile, Musk is also running the top news site in the world in X, and appears to be currently running a campaign to help elect Donald Trump to the White House. On the personal front, Musk has 12 children with three different partners.
But in spite of all this, Musk seems to manage to take out time for gaming. Musk has always been interested in video games — when he was 12, he had coded a video game named Blaster that he’d sold for $500. These days, he often streams like Diablo play live on X, and spends a considerable amount of time building his skills in the game.
Musk isn’t the only entrepreneur that’s interested in video games. Uber founder Travis Kalanick famously used to play Tennis on Nintendo Wii, and at one point was ranked number 2 in the world at the game. It appears that being competitive is one of the pre-requisites of being an entrepreneur, and — as Musk’s global rank of 19 in Diablo-4 shows — it seems to translate quite seamless into the world of computer games.