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I think there’s a fairly enormous, qualitative difference between Musk’s PoE situation and Ackman’s tennis situation. Very much separate from benefits to the tennis tour, etc.
Ackman bought his entry, but once in the tournament he played fairly and was rightfully crushed by the real pros. It’s a tacky thing to do but in the end doesn’t interfere with the status of the tennis players; to some extent the gulf between “real pro” and “competent amateur who paid his way in” is even reinforced by how much they demolished him. And, similarly, it’s clear that Ackman does know how to play tennis, he’s just not operating at the level of the tournament.
Musk wasn’t just paying for entry, he was trying to pass himself off as a “real pro” without the baseline game skills or knowledge to go along with it. As an analogy, imagine if he entered a tennis tournament using a sci-fi exoskeleton that could move his body/limbs to run fast and swing his arms with proper racket form. He’s holding his own in the tournament by making flawless serves and spectacular returns thanks to the super-tennis-suit, but he’s also making clumsy positioning blunders and misunderstanding how the scoring works, because he doesn’t actually know what he’s doing. And he’s simultaneously talking a big game about how great he is at tennis. It’s not merely tacky, it makes him look like a buffoon while also making a mockery of the sport.
@sun_the_second
This may be due to my lack of familiarity with gaming, my last real experience with anything close to high end gaming was WoW circa 2010. My impression was always that a player who bought equipment but didn't have the talent would be shown out fairly quickly, similar to a player with a great racket but no skill, difference between the games I guess.
But ultimately I find this to be pretty standard rich dude behavior. Like buying a race car: you can hack it in some SCCA local stuff but not in the pros. And ultimately, by pretending to be a top gamer, Elon reifies the idea that being a top gamer is something to be aspired to, in the same way that rich people climbing mount everest reifies alpinism as something to aspire to.
Gamers know that gaming isn't "cool" in the way alpinism would be cool even if no rich people considered climbing Everest worth their time. Hence the bafflement that Elon tried to fake being good at it, along with taking mild offense that the lie was so transparent.
Path of Exile 2 is not even a game where direct competition or direct cooperation exists in any big proportion, unlike WoW. The entire point of having top gear is to farm top content easier so you get more top gear and currency. There's no fighting the best PvP players, there's almost nothing like completing legendary WoW raids in a feat of top-notch cooperation (party play in PoE is largely done for optimized farming and not as an accomplishment in itself), there's no social status in the larger world because gaming is not Cool(tm). The fact that Elon did it exposes him as an alien who simply doesn't understand people.
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