Elon Musk followed up on a September proclamation that he’d test out video game livestreaming on X (Twitter), with a run through Diablo IV’s most difficult Tier 100 Nightmare dungeon. The October 2 stream was an unprecedented success, in the sense that it happened with—as far as I can tell—zero race-baiting. However, pervasive technical difficulties make it unlikely that X will soon be a serious streaming platform.
Musk made a burner account—@cyb3rgam3r420—to troubleshoot Twitter’s streaming capabilities for an hour, and to debut his lighting setup: a few candles in an otherwise unlit room. “For atmosphere,” Musk said about the candles.
His character, named IWillNvrDie (though Musk died three times in a later Diablo stream on his main account, once because he got annihilated by a bursting blood blister), is a werewolf Druid. He uses mostly Earth skills like Claw and the Earthern Bulwark shield, and he wields gear that complements his Storm Wolf build well, like the Greatstaff of the Crone.
“Sensible picks,” Kotaku video lead Eric Schulkin told me over Slack. “Where is he streaming from, a crypt?”
Aside from Musk’s questionable room lighting, his practice stream looked and sounded all right. On his official stream, though, Musk fretted over whether he sounded like a chipmunk—he did. The stream “upped sound frequency by 4 kHz,” he said on Twitter. The screen flickered lazily, like Musk’s tall, two-wick candle, making Musk’s silent gameplay nearly unwatchable.
Unlike Twitch or YouTube, Twitter doesn’t show live comments (which only subscribers can leave) on screen, so Musk would also sometimes drop the game entirely to giggle at his phone.
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“Chat room too full, ha ha ha ha,” he said.
At the end of his play session, Musk noted that Twitter has “a lot of things to improve” in its streaming. You might wonder how Musk finds spare time to grind to level 100 in Diablo, manage his plethora of businesses, and find time to be a good father to his 11 or so children. I don’t think he does. Court records from September 29 indicate that Musk’s ex-girlfriend and mother of at least three of his kids, Grimes (Claire Boucher), sued him for parental rights. And, well, Twitter’s as ruined as a Diablo dungeon.