Elon Musk, Video Game King? Well, Maybe Not
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
> Shivon Zilis, who has worked with Mr. Musk at several of his companies and is known to be the mother of three of his children, posted a video last week of Mr. Musk playing Diablo. In the replies, she recounted a memory of when he gamed for 17 hours on Christmas Day in 2023.
> “He took breaks for family meals and Xmas presents but was too excited for sleep, which is how he made both time with the kiddos and a 17 hour AoZ push work that day,” she wrote, referring to a challenge in Diablo. “Was a joy to see him having so much fun with it!”
> I see people posting that Elon was at Auschwitz this time last year - therefore, his recent "gesture" is not antisemitic. I was there, too. Last year. With Elon. I am embarrassed that I have photos of this on my phone. My love, Gidon Lev, was the "special guest" of this photo-op event. We thought, at the time, that it would be good publicity. But I would not share the photo today. I chatted with Elon Musk. I spent hours with him and walked with him through Auschwitz. I stood with him, looking at the nauseating heaps of hair, luggage, and shoes flooded with violet light meant to preserve it. Is Musk an antisemite? People, actually, it's worse - he doesn't care whatsoever. Elon, father of "little X" as he described his freezing cold son to me, literally does not care. He was unmoved by the experience. For Gidon, to be in the place where his father, Ernst, died on a death march - whether shot by the side of the road or having simply collapsed - was a huge deal. Elon did not care. He was about his press junket and his bodyguards. I was ten feet from him as he posed for the cameras of his entourage. He was utterly detached. He cared about how he looked. When he placed a wreath at Auschwitz and Gidon was overlooked, he walked away with the cameras whirring. This is Elon Musk. A sociopath, if ever there was one. To deduce, from this visit, that he is a friend of the Jews is desperately naive.
I wonder what HN's view is on the recent nazi salute of Elon ? All the relevant threads seem to become flagged very quickly. I think it would be a very interesting discussion, especially here.
From the community guidelines:
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic
In my (non American) point of view this transcends left vs right arguments, but this is exactly why I am curious what this community would have to say. It is an interesting topic, if only from an anthropological perspective.
So you don't turn into Russia: https://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/how-has-state-owned-media-in-russ...
Authoritarian regimes rely on disengagement and nihilism to remain in power.
Not a dumb question IMHO, but a hard one to answer. The closest thing to a 1930s-era HN might have been the classrooms and labs at places like Gottingen and Leipzig, where the 'hackers' of the day were watching the politicization of their profession nervously.
At some point it would have been too late for our counterparts with Jewish ethnicity to ask whether Ferdinand Porsche gave a Nazi salute or whether Wernher von Braun was giving speeches at Goering's favorite beer hall. They were too busy struggling with questions like, "When do I have to leave, where can I afford to take my family, and who will take us in?", bearing in mind that even the United States imposed ethnic quotas on Jewish immigrants at the time.
Those questions are the ones that crop up later, after polite society fails to pay enough attention to the earlier ones. The smart 'hackers' might have suspected what was coming, but it's always too soon to speak up, isn't it?
I just started reading The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich to get a better handle on the history of things. I read a book on Mussolini last year to try to gain some perspective. They both seemed to have risen to power through flaws in those countries' democracy, which is slightly terrifying watching the USA, as it definitely has flaws. However, I am unsure if the flaws I can see are big enough to allow for a "soft coup" at some point (and I am not an expert on what can be abused).
Him being a nutty rightwinger doing nazi salutes should put at least some off.
I've heard so many people kinda denying to themself what Musk is. Like some sort of cope.
Musk performing fascist salutes at a political rally is an interesting new phenomenon: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jan/20/trump-elo...
Like it or not, this is what's happening to the tech industry. So much of the tech sector is now precisely about politics and power.
You can't run away from it. You can't ignore it. And, if you're in the tech industry, you're responsible for it.
It's always best to see things as they are.
Sure, memes and one liners do not do well on Hacker News, but on the other hand, most "hackers" believe they are smarter and with better opinions than anybody else, which is often just a severe case of Dunning-Kruger. And the population of this site post Reddit fiasco is no different than Reddit anyway; how many Eternal Septembers have we gone through?
Your account has been created pre-COVID, so you must have witnessed that some topics should just be avoided for the sake of anybody's sanity, whether it's on HN or not.
In general, up/down vote systems just create echo chambers, not interesting and nuanced discussions.
I might be the stereotypical old man yelling at clouds, but I miss when this place was about startups, programming and Wozniak-tier hackers, not an Ars Technica with a Bay Area accent that attracts anybody calling themselves a "techie" to discuss the daily news.
300+ comments here for your entertainment
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42772995
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42773778
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42774621
I'm not sure it was that interesting though. This I found kind of interesting: Apparently his mum's parents were Hitler supporters and moved to South Africa from Canada as it was too liberal. Musk's dad talking about it: https://youtu.be/B6e1ES4MLD0?t=200
2) an important part of his public persona is that he's supposed to be genuinely super smart and capable at everything. Many employees and other related figures have attested to him having preternatural abilities at rocket and car engineering.
If he is willing to make under the table payments and shamelessly pass off other people's work as his own for such an insignificant feat as being good at video games, what does that say about his involvement with actually important things? The parallel is very easy to draw.
Do you have examples of this? In the past, I've looked for accounts of people who've worked with Musk praising his technical (not product, not sales/marketing) skillset, and I have been unable to find any firsthand accounts. Such an account would somewhat change my assessment of Musk.
All I know about video games is people play them 24/7. It was completely obvious to me he wasn't going to invest his time in something so stupid.
The idea the world's richest man who is trying to amass political power could be this delusional is deeply disturbing.
I mean, one assumes that this is in the same sense that Kim Jong Un happens to be the world’s leading expert on whatever the factory he happens to be visiting does.
Also, I'm bad at video games, but I don't care about that because they're fun to play. When you get someone else to do it for you you're taking all the fun out of it. I learned when I was younger that cheating ruins the experience. So if you're all about winning, that shows a lot of naivety.
Hughes's downward spiral occurred before most of us were old enough to watch it happen, so Musk is our next best chance.