Watch Elon Musk’s Epic Gaming Meltdown: Elon Rage Quit Gaming Livestream as Viewers Roast Him For Sucking At It

Bullying is bad but I really enjoyed this for some reason

I almost felt sorry watching this video. Then I remembered who it was, and the Schadenfreude washed over me like a warm hug.

Elon Musk, the SpaceX maestro and self-styled tech messiah, took a break from colonizing Mars and shaking up Washington to dabble in a less cosmic pursuit: gaming. This past Saturday, he fired up a livestream of Path of Exile 2—a gritty, free-to-play action RPG—ostensibly to test Starlink’s airborne connectivity from the plush cabin of his private jet. What unfolded, though, wasn’t a triumph of technology or skill. It was a 30-minute trainwreck that ended with Musk slamming the metaphorical door on his way out, chased by a swarm of gleefully vicious kids in the game’s chat. Polygon caught the whole thing, and it’s a doozy.

The trouble started early. Musk, piloting his character through PoE 2’s unforgiving world, ran headlong into the game’s first boss. And died. Then died again. And again. The chat lit up like a fireworks display on a budget surplus. “NO FRIENDS,” one player typed, all caps for emphasis. “WILL DIE ALONE,” another piled on. A third went for the jugular: “DUMB AND UGLY.” Somewhere in the mix, a kid invoked Musk’s estranged daughter, Vivian Wilson, who’d recently torched him online for being a disaster at Overwatch. “She was right,” the player crowed. Ouch.

Musk, for his part, didn’t exactly rise above it. About 29 minutes in, after one too many deaths—and one too many barbs—he muttered something under his breath, dropped a slur that’s best left unprinted, and bailed. “There’s a lot of r*tards in the chat,” he’d said earlier, proving once again that his filter’s as reliable as a paper umbrella in a hurricane. The stream cut off, leaving viewers with the digital equivalent of a mic drop, minus the cool.

This isn’t Musk’s first rodeo in the gaming world, and that’s where the plot thickens. Earlier this year, word got around that the richest man alive had been juicing his PoE 2 stats—not through skill, but by hiring ringers. Yep, Musk confessed to paying top-tier players to grind out high-level characters for him, a move that turned him into a punchline among the game’s diehards. The idea was to flex some cred with the gaming crowd—maybe even the incel-adjacent corners of it who’d eat up a billionaire’s pixelated swagger. Instead, it backfired. Hard. Gamers sniffed out the scam, and the goodwill he might’ve earned went up in smoke.

Saturday’s stream only poured gas on the fire. The PoE 2 faithful, already primed to hate him, showed no mercy. “Elon Musk just rage quit his Twitter stream after repeatedly dying to a tutorial boss in the new PoE2 patch on hardcore,” one X user posted, barely containing their delight. Down in New Zealand, streamer Quin69TV— who’d already branded Musk a fraud months back—cackled through a reaction video. “Based on his current gameplay, there’s no possible way he’s getting out of Act One,” Quin said, grinning like a cat with a fresh canary. “He’s just going to keep dying over and over again.”

You’d think Musk might’ve dodged the carnage by toggling the “Do Not Disturb” option or hiding the chat altogether. Several users even suggested it mid-stream. But no—he let the insults roll in, either too stubborn or too clueless to shut them off. Maybe he thought he could outlast the trolls. Maybe he just didn’t know how the settings worked. Either way, it was a choice, and it didn’t end well.

The backdrop to all this isn’t exactly flattering. Musk’s public stock has taken a beating lately—his antics with the so-called Department of Government Efficiency and his broader tear-down of anything resembling bureaucracy haven’t won him many fans. Gamers, it turns out, aren’t above holding a grudge. They see a guy who cheats at their sacred pastime, throws money at problems he can’t solve with talent, and then flips out when the crowd calls him on it. It’s not a good look.

Still, there’s something almost endearing about Musk’s refusal to quit gaming entirely, even after this latest humiliation. He’s a guy who’s built rockets and rewired industries, yet here he is, fumbling through a dungeon crawler like a newbie with a borrowed controller. The schadenfreude’s thick—you can practically taste it—but there’s a human streak in there too. He’s not good at Path of Exile 2. He’s not even passable. And when the kids came for him, he didn’t just lose the game—he lost his cool. For 30 minutes, the world’s most polarizing billionaire was just another guy getting owned online. And then he logged off.

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