Elon Musk Throws Tantrum After Being Exposed by Gamers, Leaks YouTuber's DMs and Seemingly Takes Away His Checkmark

Professional manchild and Tesla billionaire Elon Musk is deeply unhappy that he's been caught faking clout — and now he's throwing a tantrum, taking away the toys of other tykes who were mean to him.

And no, this isn't some far-fetched analogy. Earlier this month, Musk compellingly accused of masquerading as a top-level player of the recently released free-to-play action RPG Path of Exile 2 (PoE 2) by paying a skilled gamer to level up a character to the top game's top echelons.

During a January 7 livestream on X-formerly-Twitter, the platform's owner struggled with the very basics of the game, failing to even reliably click certain UI elements. In other words, there was no chance this was the same gamer who'd been controlling a character that would've required many hundreds of hours of grinding to level up.

Then the character mysteriously perma-died, sparking conspiracy theories that Musk had killed it due to his own incompetence.

Some of the game's most well-known players mocked his ruse extensively on social media, calling him out for a bizarre "ego-trip."

Now, Musk has seemingly had enough of being made fun of. In an apparent attempt to silence his critics, the richest man in the world took aim at American YouTuber Zack Hoyt, a streamer who goes by the handle Asmongold.

Earlier this week, Hoyt published a 32-minute video on YouTube, discussing how Musk won't be "getting away" with parading as a top-level gamer — one of countless takedowns of the billionaire's childish antics on the video platform.

Days later, Musk took to X-formerly-Twitter, sharing screenshots of DMs between him and the controversial streamer, a privacy-invading practice that — as a Community Note appended to his tantrum points out — is "generally against the platform's Terms of Service (ToS)." Hoyt's blue check mark on the platform — a symbol that used to show someone's identity had been verified, but which Musk degraded to something anyone can get for a monthly fee, with disastrous results — also vanished.

Musk's argument that Hoyt is a mere pawn who has to "ask his boss for permission before he can do anything" takes some mental gymnastics to understand.

"Who are these mysterious editors," Musk messaged Hoyt.

Hoyt was happy to oblige, informing Musk of who his two editors were, which is easily obtainable and public information.

"Interesting," Musk said, seemingly believing that he had exposed a conspiracy: that a popular YouTuber works with other people to edit and produce his popular videos.

Other X users were puzzled by Musk's lashing out.

"So these DMs prove what exactly?" one user replied. "Obviously Asmon hired those editors and gave them agency over his YT because they know what they are doing, and it obviously works given how good his YT is running."

"Elon, his editors work for him," another user chimed in. "Not the other way around."

The Reddit community was quick to point out Musk's glaring double standard.

"Elon is so stupid," one user wrote. "Does Elon run the whole of Tesla, Space X, X, and everything else on his own? No."

"He thinks they are like newspaper editors that control the content and what he says," a different Redditor posited.

"Oh god it’s just stupid enough to be true," another user replied.

Meanwhile, Musk took to X-formerly-Twitter to seemingly try to shut down the rumors.

During a Wednesday stream, Musk claimed that the level 97 PoE 2 account was being controlled by a "Chinese driver" whose name is "Yilongma."

"I rely on him for everything," he said during the stream.

While it seems like Musk was doubling down on the claim that he was behind the top-level character by conjuring a Chinese name that sounds an awful lot like his own, we can't tell if he's joking or not.

In other words, it's a classic ruse to wriggle out of controversy by piling on confusion — exactly the kind of thing a child would do post-tantrum.

More on the saga: Did Elon Musk Pay a Gamer to Level a Character Up, Then Accidentally Kill It Permanently Due to Incompetence?

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