Musk vaulted to the top of a popular videogame. Everyone’s asking where he found the time.

Summary
The head of six companies says he recently became one of the world’s top ‘Diablo IV’ players, a milestone gamers say would have required playing ‘all day, every day’This past fall, Elon Musk unveiled Tesla’s new robotaxi, launched dozens of rockets and spent weeks campaigning on behalf of president-elect Donald Trump. He also notched another achievement that some say is even more impressive.
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.
Speaking on Joe Rogan’s podcast in November, Musk claimed to be one of the top 20 “Diablo IV" players in the world. He also said he probably spent more time playing the shooter game “Quake" during his last year in college than he did in all of his classes.
Musk’s marathon gaming sessions frequently bleed into his business life. Before publicly announcing his decision to acquire Twitter, he stayed up until 5 a.m. playing the role-playing hit “Elden Ring" with the singer Grimes, his romantic partner at the time, Walter Isaacson wrote in his biography of Musk.
In October, Musk shared a video of his “Diablo IV" gameplay on X that captured audio from a call he was on at the same time, during which he appeared to discuss the Starship rocket test launch with employees of his space-exploration company, SpaceX.
Playing videogames isn’t Musk’s only time-sucking passion. Last year through the end of July, he posted on X about 13,000 times—or about 61 posts a day, The Wall Street Journal previously reported.
More recently, Musk spent more than a week at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Fla., sitting in on meetings and interviews with candidates for cabinet positions, joining the president-elect’s calls with foreign leaders such as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, and recruiting friends and allies for crucial positions in the government.
Investors and analysts have questioned Musk’s ability to balance running all of his companies.
The issue is particularly thorny now that Tesla is preparing to appeal a Delaware judge’s decision to throw out a 2018 pay package, which granted Musk billions of dollars in Tesla stock. Among the questions in the dispute is whether the large pay package was necessary to keep Musk focused on running Tesla, a public company now valued at $1.3 trillion.
Speaking at The Wall Street Journal CEO Council in 2023, Musk said he tries to focus just on one company per day.
Other tech executives have found ways to game while managing large companies. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook parent Meta, has long been enamored with the strategy game “Civilization." Phil Spencer, CEO of gaming at Microsoft, plays various titles on his phone during meetings.
Musk’s claim that he completed in under two minutes the 150th tier of the Pit in “Diablo IV" shows he is one of its top-ranking players, according to at least one unofficial leaderboard that’s based on user submissions. Microsoft’s Blizzard Entertainment, which released the “Diablo IV" in June 2023, doesn’t maintain a leaderboard of its own for the game.
On social-media platforms like Reddit, some gamers say they don’t doubt Musk’s ability to clear that top tier so quickly, especially since it’s possible to run through it over and over. But they wonder how he reached it in less than two months.
Some players speculate that Musk paid someone to “grind" his or her way to the top on his behalf. Grinding refers to having to complete a series of often-monotonous tasks to advance in a game.
Others note that Musk’s quick ascension in “Diablo IV" may have been partly due to a glitch that Blizzard inadvertently introduced in October, giving players a way to obtain more power than they’d normally have. Blizzard has said it plans to remove the bug when it releases a new season for the game sometime this year.