Elon Musk’s ‘top 20’ Diablo IV claim is as real as his self-driving cars

Elon Musk is a busy man right now. He's supposedly running X, SpaceX, Tesla, and Neuralink, all while actively campaigning for Trump. But despite those myriad concerns, Musk still finds the time to play Diablo 4. He's even said he's pretty good at it, claiming in a recent interview with Joe Rogan that he's in the top 20 of Diablo 4 players - a feat that apparently only two Americans can claim. If this sounds like the unearned boasting from the same guy who claimed his Cybertrucks are bulletproof... it is.

The Pit is a timed dungeon in Diablo 4. Players are given 15 minutes to clear out monsters and the final boss, with each death shaving an increasing amount of time off the overall timer. Players who can complete The Pit earn endgame materials used to improve their gear, and since this is an endgame dungeon, the fights are pretty difficult. Clearing the dungeon as fast as possible is, therefore, a decent indication that you can Diablo pretty good.

In fact, there's a leaderboard ranking players by their Pit completion times which is the basis for Musk's claim. If you check out the Pit leaderboard at helltides.com, sure enough, at the time of publication, Elon Musk is sitting smack dab at number 20.

But here's the catch.

There are no official leaderboards for The Pit. Helltides.com is not affiliated with Activision Blizzard. These rankings are based on screen-recorded runs submitted by the players themselves. And the number of submissions used to create this list? 881.

To be fair to Musk, clearing The Pit in 2 minutes and 45 seconds is no mean feat. It shows that he knows what he's doing (or that he at least knows how to look up optimal builds for his class on sites like IcyVeins.com.) But it strains the hell out of credulity to claim he's in the top 20 Diablo 4 players in the world based on a list made up of only 881 people. Steam's concurrent player count alone shows the game sitting at 11,000 players.

In an interview with The Verge, Fayz, co-owner of helltides.com, agrees with Musk calling himself a "top 20" Diablo 4 player. "It's the best global list we have," Fayz said over Discord. "Elon's claim is valid." But Fayz recognizes the leaderboard's limitations.

"It's as comprehensive as it gets in terms of recorded Pit runs with video proof, since our community always alerts us when new top runs are recorded and posted on social media," Fayz wrote. "But, there's no way for us to know about Pit runs that aren't recorded and shared."

Musk is one of many billionaires who've made lofty but unverifiable claims about their gaming prowess. In a TikTok video for Pubity, Mark Zuckerberg recently boasted that he's "close to grandmaster status" in Civilization and that it'd surprise him if anyone in the world could beat him. In 2017, the New York Times reported that Travis Kalanick, the former CEO of Uber, "once held the world's second-highest score for the Nintendo Wii Tennis video game." (This led to an interesting deep-dive from Ars Technica, which concluded Kalanick was wrong.) Musk could have legitimately claimed exceptional ability in Diablo 4 and left it at that. But, as is usually the case with billionaires, his ego got in the way, leading him to make statements that just aren't supported in fact.