PERSPECTIVE

Shoot first, ask questions later

STEVEN POOLE

Illustration konsume.me

Twitter itself is a game, or a metagame: the oncebullied schoolboy could now “own the playground”

One of the more surprising things about the much-hyped recent biography of Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson is to learn just how often, in the midst of corporate crisis and other stresses, the shitposting overlord of Tesla Motors and SpaceX would simply stay up all night playing videogames. Teenage boys the world over now have an excellent retort to concerned parents.

When Edge began publishing 30 years ago, Musk was known for epic binges of Civilization while an undergraduate at the University Of Pennsylvania. He had grown up playing early arcade games, and aged 13 coded his own simplistic vertical shooter, Blastar; later, he enjoyed office binges of Street Fighter II and Quake III Arena. But his persistent passion is strategy games. In 2021, Isaacson reports, Musk became especially “obsessed” with the cutely rectilinear turn-based strategy game The Battle Of Polytopia on his phone. “On a visit to Tesla’s Berlin factory,” Isaacson relates, “he got so wrapped up in Polytopia that he delayed meetings with the local managers.” Later that year – the same year Musk became the world’s richest man – he locked himself in his room to play Polytopia at his wife’s birthday party, where his former wife Grimes was DJing.