Musk Tops "Diablo 4", Everyone Wondering Where He Found the Time

Original Article Title: "Musk Tops 'Diablo 4,' Leaving Many Wondering Where He Finds the Time"

Original Article Authors: Sarah E. Needleman, Becky Peterson, THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Image Source: EMIL LENDOFWSJ, GETTY IMAGES, BLIZZARD

Throughout this past fall, Elon Musk unveiled Tesla's new self-driving rental car, launched dozens of rockets, and spent weeks campaigning for President-elect Trump. And yet, he achieved another feat, one that some might find even more impressive.

The billionaire has claimed to be one of the world's top players in "Diablo IV." Diablo IV is a popular dark fantasy video game where players can craft potions and slay demons.

On November 20, Musk took to social media platform X and wrote, "You can learn a lot about life by speedrunning the hardest difficulty in a video game." He then declared that he had just completed the highest level of "The Pit" in the game in under two minutes. He even shared a video clip to commemorate this milestone.

Such an achievement requires more than just monster-killing skills. Just reaching level 150 alone takes hours of gameplay. "The Pit" was only added to the game in May of this year, and the latest season started on October 7, resetting all players' progress to level 1. This means Musk reached the top level in 45 days or even less.

Musk oversees six companies, including the brain-machine interface startup Neuralink, the tunneling startup The Boring Company, and the AI startup xAI. He is a prolific user of social media platform X, which he acquired in 2022. As the Co-Director of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) in the Trump administration, he is now helping oversee a comprehensive overhaul of the federal government.

He's taken on so much responsibility that everyone wonders: how does he even find time to play games?

29-year-old Damir Sabic is a loyal player of the "Diablo" game series, saying it took him about 80 hours to reach level 129 in the "Abyss" in 12 copies. He said he stopped playing at that point because leveling up became tedious. He described Musk's claim of clearing level 150 in November as "too crazy."

"You have to sit in front of the computer and play games every day," said Sabic, a Houston-based 3D printing artist.

Image Source: BLIZZARD

Musk claimed during an 11-copy appearance on Joe Rogan's podcast that he is one of the top 20 players worldwide in "Diablo 4." He also said that during his last year of college, his time playing the shooter game "Quake" may have exceeded all his class time.

Musk's marathon gaming sessions often bleed into his business life. Walter Isaacson wrote in his biography of Musk that before publicly announcing the acquisition of Twitter, Musk stayed up until 5 a.m. playing the role-playing game "Elden Ring" with his then-girlfriend, Grimes.

In October last year, Sk shared a video of him playing "Diablo 4" on the X platform, capturing audio of him on a phone call at the same time. In the call, he appeared to be discussing the test firing of his space exploration company SpaceX's Starship rocket with employees.

Playing video games is not Musk's only time-consuming hobby. According to The Wall Street Journal, as of the end of July last year, Musk had posted about 13,000 times on the X platform, averaging about 61 posts per day.

Most recently, Musk spent over a week at Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida, attending meetings and interviews with cabinet position candidates, participating in calls with foreign leaders like Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, recruiting friends and allies for key government positions.

Investors and analysts are questioning Musk's ability to balance the operations of all his companies.

This issue is particularly thorny now as Tesla prepares to appeal a Delaware judge's ruling overturning a 2018 compensation package that awarded Musk billions of dollars' worth of Tesla stock. One question in this dispute is whether this enormous compensation plan is necessary to keep Musk focused on running Tesla, a publicly traded company currently valued at $1.3 trillion.

Musk, speaking at the 2023 Wall Street Journal CEO Council, said he tries to focus on only one company each day.

Other tech executives have found ways to play games while running large companies. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has long been obsessed with the strategy game Civilization. Phil Spencer, the head of Microsoft's gaming business, plays various games on his phone during meetings.

Musk claims he cleared the 150th-floor Abyssal dungeon in Diablo IV in less than two minutes, indicating he is one of the top players in the game, at least according to an official leaderboard based on user-submitted data. Blizzard Entertainment, a subsidiary of Microsoft, released Diablo IV in June 2023 but did not release its own leaderboard for the game.

On social media platforms like Reddit, some players say they don't doubt Musk's ability to quickly clear the highest level, especially since they can repeat this level over and over. However, they wonder how he achieved this in under two months.

Some players speculate that Musk paid someone to help him "power level" to the maximum floor. "Power leveling" refers to completing a series of usually mundane tasks to progress in the game.

Others point out that Musk's quick advancement in Diablo IV may have been partly due to a glitch inadvertently introduced by Blizzard in October, allowing players to gain more power than intended. Blizzard has stated plans to fix this glitch in an update later this year.

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