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The billionaire declared himself one of the world’s best players of “Diablo IV,” a blockbuster videogame set in a dark fantasy realm that involves making elixirs and slaying demons.
“So many life lessons to be learned from speedrunning video games on max difficulty,” Musk wrote on his social-media platform X on Nov. 20, before going on to announce that he’d just cleared the highest tier of a section of the game called “The Pit” in under two minutes. He included a video clip of the milestone.
Such an accomplishment requires more than just expertise in monster slashing. It takes dozens of hours just to reach the highest tier, which is level 150. The Pit was only added to the game in May and the latest season kicked off on Oct. 7, resetting all players’ progression to level 1. That suggests Musk made his way to the top level in 45 days or less.
Musk oversees six companies, including brain-computer startup Neuralink, tunneling startup The Boring Company and artificial-intelligence startup xAI. He’s a prolific poster on the social-media platform X, which he bought in 2022. He is now helping oversee a sweeping revamp of the federal government as co-head of Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.
His vast array of commitments have left everyone wondering: How on Earth did he find the time to do it?
Damir Sabic, a 29-year-old devotee of the Diablo franchise, said it took him about 80 hours to reach the 129th tier of the Pit in December. He said he stopped playing at that point because leveling up became tedious. He described Musk’s claim of clearing the 150th tier in November as “insane.”
“It’s like sitting all day, every day, at your computer playing,” said Sabic, a 3-D printing artist in Houston.
Much more at the link but the wrong question is being asked.
Looking at everything Elon Musk is doing, the obvious question is what in the world are the other billionaire CEOs doing to earn their pay?
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Boring Under Las Vegas
Elon Musk’s Boring Company spent years pitching cities on a novel solution to traffic, an underground transportation system to whisk passengers through tunnels in electric vehicles. Proposals in Illinois and California fizzled after officials and the public began scrutinizing details of the plans and seeking environmental reviews.
But in Las Vegas, the tunneling company is building Musk’s vision beneath the city’s urban core thanks to an unlikely partner: the tourism marketing organization best known for selling the image that “What Happens Here, Stays Here.”
The powerful Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority greenlit the idea and funded an 0.8-mile route at its convention center. As that small “people mover” opened in 2021, the authority was already urging the county and city to approve plans for 104 stations across 68 miles of tunnels.
The project is also realizing Musk’s notion of how government officials should deal with entrepreneurs: avoid lengthy reviews before building and instead impose fines later if anything goes awry. Musk’s views on regulatory power have taken on new significance in light of his close ties to President-elect Donald Trump and his role in a new effort to slash rules in the name of improving efficiency. The Las Vegas project, now well under way, is a case study of the regulatory climate Musk favors.
Because the project, now known as the Vegas Loop, is privately operated and receives no federal funding, it is exempt from the kinds of exhaustive governmental vetting and environmental analyses demanded by the other cities that Boring pitched. Such reviews assess whether a proposal is the best option and inform the public of potential impacts to traffic and the environment.
The head of the convention authority has called the project the only viable way to ease traffic on the Las Vegas Strip and in the surrounding area — a claim that was never publicly debated as the Clark County Commission and Las Vegas City Council granted Boring permission to build and operate the system beneath city streets. The approvals allow the company to build and operate close to homes and businesses without the checks and balances that typically apply to major public transit projects.
Much more at the link.
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