Elon Musk says he’ll use AI to ‘make games great again’ after anti-woke tirade

Elon Musk has announced plans to form a video game studio within X’s (Twitter) AI division.

On the social media platform, Dogecoin creator Billy Markus opined about “how game developers and game journalism got so ideologically captured.” In response, Musk said “Too many game studios that are owned by massive corporations. xAI is going to start an AI game studio to make games great again!”

Too many game studios that are owned by massive corporations. @xAI is going to start an AI game studio to make games great again! https://t.co/UR4nFODyfd

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 27, 2024

Of course, this comment is immensely hypocritical, as Musk is the world’s richest man who owns some of the world’s most massive corporations. What’s more, whatever issues you might have with games, AI will certainly not replace the many talented developers who are creating great art. (This is all assuming, of course, that the xAI game studio actually happens, which, given Musk’s many lies and failures, certainly isn’t a given.)

But what’s especially funny about Musk wanting to step into game development is that he’s already been roasted multiple times for trying to act cool simply by playing games. In 2022, he boastfully shared an Elden Ring build that was objectively terrible, and more recently, he’s tried to proclaim himself as one of the best Diablo IV players in the world. That latter point is especially amusing — either he’s an even more irresponsible leader and parent than we thought and he’s neglecting his many businesses and children for a lot of classic Diablo grinding, or (more realistically) he got others to use his account and boost his rankings for him. Either way, it’s pretty pathetic, but that’s par for the course with Musk.

And what started this whole conversation was another classic — and profoundly stupid — battle in the never-ending “culture war.” It started when Asmongold, a YouTuber best known for having a filthy room, cried about Avowed, the latest game from Xbox-owned Obsidian Entertainment, allowing you to choose your pronouns in the character creator. (The horror!) Naturally, this led to the likes of Mark “Grummz” Kern — a disgraced former game developer and failed instigator of ‘GamerGate 2’ — and Musk getting angry on social media about this completely innocuous feature.

i find this tweet hilarious because in the screenshots they’re talking about how they will not buy avowed because it has pronouns. and suddenly when the art director responds with “ok fuck you then” they’re clutching their pearls. pic.twitter.com/z9UDVmOOnA

— kate bush’s husband (@airbagged) November 27, 2024

In response, Matt Hansen, the art director on Avowed, posted on Bluesky that he was happy to have angered Musk over this. He went on to encourage more Black artists to apply to Obsidian and that they will “always” have his priority as there are “too many crusty old white dudes” in games. Naturally, this led grifter Ian Miles Cheong to make baseless claims that “Microsoft’s gaming division is excluding whites from being hired to work on their video games. Musk then shared Cheong’s ridiculous assertion and tagged Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, claiming “this is illegal.”

Of course, even if you think Hansen’s comments were incendiary, the fact of the matter is all of these grifters are blatantly lying about Microsoft and Obsidian over those comments. It’s yet another example of Musk — a person with over 200 million followers — amplifying misinformation on his platform.

And above all else, none of these clowns have even played Avowed. As someone who actually went to Obsidian recently to both play a few hours of the game and talk to several developers (including Hansen, who was delightful), I can tell you it’s a very promising fantasy action-RPG. (Other previews have echoed this, and for completely non-ideological reasons!) But of course, those gosh-darned pronouns are so scary and dangerous to these grown men that they’ll write off an entire artistic work because of them.

For anyone who isn’t a hate-filled manchild, though, you can look forward to Avowed when it launches on Xbox Series X/S and PC (plus Game Pass) on February 18th.

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