Anyone who runs a company needs a way to de-stress. For some CEOs that might mean golf or sailing. For Elon Musk, who runs or owns Tesla, SpaceX, and X (formerly Twitter), the main method is playing video games.
āIt calms my mind. Killing the demons in a video game calms the demons in my mind,ā Musk told podcaster Lex Fridman in an episode released Friday. He added later, āIāve played a lot of video games because itās my primary recreational activity.ā
The worldās richest man also said, āMy mind is a storm. I donāt think most people would want to be me. They may think they would want to be me, but they donāt, they donāt know, they donāt understand.ā
Muskās longtime companion Grimes, with whom he has three children, told biographer Walter Isaacson that Musk has no āhobbies or ways to relax other than video games, but he takes those so seriously that it gets very intense.ā
Among his favorite titles is The Battle of Polytopia, billed as a āstrategy game about building a civilization and going into battle.ā Players compete to control resources and develop technologies, and they wage battles in order to build an empire. Muskās brother Kimbal told Isaacson that his famous sibling said Polytopia āwould teach me to be a CEO like he was.ā The game was also fodder for a series of life and business lessons for Elon, with the first one being, āEmpathy is not an asset.ā
Another favorite of Muskās is Elden Ring, centered on war and empire-building, which he told Fridman was a ācandidate for the best game ever, top five for sure.ā He added that itās āincredibly creativeā with āstunningā art.
āBeating hatred in the internal realm,ā he added, āis the hardest boss battle in life and in the video game.ā
Muskās game-playing has also preceded some key business decisions. He pulled the trigger on buying Twitter right after playing Elden Ring until five in the morning, Grimes told Isaacson.
Mostly, Musk seems to use video games to get into a certain zone.
āIf you play a tough video game, you can get into a state of flow which is very enjoyable. Admittedly it needs to be not too easy, not too hardākind of in the Goldilocks zone,ā he told Fridman.
āI guess you generally want to feel like youāre progressing in the game. And thereās also beautiful art, engaging storylines, and itās like an amazing puzzle to solve.ā
ā¦that is not how I would describe that fukken game.
The gameās setting is pretty well thought-out for how one civilization builds its architecture on the ruins of another, and how old symbols get re-appropriated by conquerors. It has the visual distinctions of a world with a long lost history.
Thereās a zero percent chance thatās what Elmo meant. He meant āwhen you win, you get to sit on a throne and be King of the placeā
you did it, you became the elden ring
So thatās why they call it that!
and also the empires are genocidal, including that aborted subplot where youāre walking through a mass grave of the people who were really nice to you, just before being given the choice to burn everything down forever.
I meanā¦it isā¦in the sense of āDo Not Build The Torment Nexusā