“Grasping at straws” doesn’t even begin to properly define The Washington Post’s latest barking mad line of attack against X owner Elon Musk: Virtue-signaling on his video game ethics.
The seriousness of Post technology reporter Drew Harwell’s insane 1,694-word agitprop against Musk to rile up the gamers across the cyberverse could be summed up by his headline: “Does Elon Musk cheat at video games? An investigation.”
Yes, he actually called this an “investigation.” The piece just went downhill from there: “The world’s richest man has admitted to paying to boost his online warriors into global leaderboards, raising questions about his gaming prowess — and his need for digital praise.” Talk about making a mountain out of a very puny molehill!
Harwell sought to pick apart Musk’s X posts and comments to podcasters Joe Rogan and Lex Friedman flexing his gaming bona fides on noted titles such as “Diablo IV,” “Tier 100 Nightmare,” and “Path of Exile 2.” In the process, Harwell just provided more evidence why The Post is virtually obsessed with Musk: “But after poring over his live-streamed gameplay, online sleuths recently made a shocking accusation: Musk had cheated.”
Wow, what a revelation! Well, not really, considering that about 57 percent of Americans who game “revealed that they have used either single-player or multiplayer cheats while playing a video game,” according to a 2022 study by YouGov and PLITCH. As PLITCH summarized, “Using Cheats is Common.”
But Harwell, acting as gaming community gatekeeper, had the backbone to make his newspaper a laughingstock by suggesting this event somehow undermines Musk’s role as President Donald Trump’s leader of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE):
The strange episode has undercut Musk amid a rapid rise in his political prominence, as a top Republican donor and the leader of the Trump administration’s new “Department of Government Efficiency,” a nongovernmental advisory panel known as DOGE.
How Harwell made this bizarre stretch from Musk’s gaming habits to his value as a Trump advisor is a feat unto itself.
Harwell alleged that scuttlebutt from the gaming community suggested Musk “had pursued a widely mocked tactic known as ‘boosting,’ paying strangers to play his character and rake in loot so that, when he logged in, he could face challenges with the most powerful gear.”
To put an exclamation point on how ridiculous this non-scandal is, PLITCH released another 2024 study with neurotechnology group Brainamics finding that “Using Cheats makes Gamers Happy.” Are you laughing yet? In short, using cheats “during gameplay increases players’ fun and guarantees an almost complete elimination of boredom and negative emotional experiences.” In other words Harwell — in the grand pantheon of online gaming — this isn’t a story, let alone one that’s over 1,000 words.
What’s humorous is that Harwell seemed to admit this point, but still tried to massage his piece into some kind of a bombshell:
As scandals go, Musk’s drama isn’t exactly Watergate. But it has nevertheless baffled a community of gamers that once deified him as a celebrity geek and has raised questions among former fans about his need for online praise and domination. Why would a famous billionaire, at the peak of his real-world power, care so much about beating nobodies in a fantasy video game?
Jeepers, who knows, Harwell? But we can plausibly speculate that no one really cares.
