Elon Musk Is Livestreaming Himself Playing A Videogame, Except It’s The Federal Budget

Let’s try to get inside his head a bit, if that’s even possible

Elon Musk, as you know, is both the world’s richest man, the owner of CEO and X (formerly known as Twitter), and the head of DOGE, the recently created Department of Government Efficiency.

DOGE exists in a strange, weird, liminal space. It’s not technically a part of the federal government — it’s more of an advisory group to the president — but it has effectively taken over a preexisting government technology office and appears to have basically unfettered access to anything it wants, including, as has been widely reported, highly sensitive payment systems and databases usually accessed only by a small number of career government employees. (Today, it was reported that DOGE employees have gained access to the Department of Education’s systems, apparently in anticipation of an upcoming executive order from President Trump that will massively slash the Department of Education.)

I’m not going to focus on the legal questions surrounding DOGE, which are legion and beyond-urgent, but Chas Danner has a good weekend summary of the first days of DOGE in Intelligencer, and this article in The New York Times is a gripping and must-read account of the chaos Musk and his small coterie of young pups are unleashing on the government. A huge part of the confusion stems from who actually works for the government and in which capacity, who has which clearances to access which information, and so on. It didn’t help clear things up when, to take one of many examples, one of the pups in question charged with helping to destroy USAID suddenly had a USAID email address. (I don’t think this even requires a “disclosure” per se, but between having lived and worked in DC and having then gone to public policy school, I have a good number of friends and acquaintances in and around the federal government, including USAID. It goes without saying that they are having a hard time and, being a human being, I feel badly for them.)

There are good journalists on those parts of the story. I want to instead try to climb inside Musk’s head a bit. In much the same way that any organization Donald Trump runs will eventually see its staffing, goals, and tactics bend toward Trump’s personal idiosyncrasies, the same is true of Musk. And Musk appears to — at least temporarily — have an amount of government power that is unprecedented for a private citizen, at least if the Times’ reporting is any indication.

To borrow from Thomas Nagel, what is it like to be Elon Musk at the moment?

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One important thing to know about Elon Musk is that he’s a gamer. In fact, before all this popped off, he was at the center of an entertaining but orders-of-magnitude less important mini-scandal in the gaming world. Musk claimed to have one of the top characters in Path of Exile 2, a wildly popular game currently in early access. The game involves killing a lot of monsters in search of loot — more on this shortly — and while incomplete at the moment, it’s the sort of game someone can dump thousands of hours into.

Musk claimed to have one of the top-ranked characters in the world. This would have been surprising given that he is a busy guy. He livestreamed himself playing it, and it quickly became clear, to anyone even faintly familiar with the endgame content he was streaming, that he did not, in fact, know how to play the game. Most likely he paid someone to “pilot” a character to a very high level, and then claimed that character as his own. If you want to get more into the details, you can watch this video, but my understanding is this isn’t a close call.

Why would the 53-year-old richest man in the world pretend to be extremely good at a video game that any reasonable person would understand he simply doesn’t have the time to play? Now that there’s an actual national interest in understanding his personality, it seems like an important question, but alas — I have to set it aside for now.

Instead, let’s talk a bit more about these games. PoE 2 is the latest offshoot of Diablo (1997), one of the most famous and successful computer games of all time. In Diablo and the many sequels and spiritual sequels it has birthed, you walk around largely randomly generated landscapes slaughtering endless hordes of enemies. Every time you kill one, there’s a chance “loot” will drop. It’s usually color-coded to indicate its rarity. When I was a wee lad, I would play the original Diablo for many hours hoping for a King’s Sword of Haste or some otherwise god-tier piece of loot to drop.

The best of these “diablolikes” are brilliantly designed, but they also prey upon some very deep human tendencies toward addictive behavior. One of the foundational findings of the psychological field of behaviorism, which simply studies how organisms respond to stimuli and subsequently learn about the world around them, is that variable reward schedules are the most addictive. To oversimplify: If every time I slaughter a goblin, it pops out a powerful artifact, the game won’t have much of a long-term hold on me. If nothing ever pops out when I slaughter a goblin, same deal. But somewhere in the middle? That’s how I get hooked.

Let’s say every time I kill a goblin, there’s a, say, 0.2% chance that a helpful piece of gear will pop out — something I can either equip my character with, making him more powerful, tote back to town for a hefty payout from the in-game “merchant,” or trade with another character for something I’ll find more useful. Because of the nature of probability, this will give rise to a variable reward schedule. Sometimes I’ll play for two hours between useful “drops,” and sometimes I’ll get two of them within minutes of one another. If you’re not a gamer and are skeptical about the addictiveness of any of this, I’d direct you to your nearest bank of slot machines and the poor, glassy-eyed souls sitting in rapture to them.

Okay, so these games have been around since the nineties. What’s newer is streaming. If you’re a successful streamer, then every minute you play the game, you have fans reacting via text “in chat,” encouraging you, and sending you money in the forms of one-time donations or ongoing paid subscriptions (“subs”) to your channel. So the private reward of watching your character become increasingly powerful via random drops melds with the public reward of reactions from a community that feels a parasocial relationship to you. Both positive and negative events lead to audience reactions, of course. When something big happens to a famous streamer — when there’s a rare loot drop or when a character in a permadeath game mode dies (meaning the character is gone forever, regardless of how many dozens or hundreds of hours the streamer controlling it poured in) — there’s a massive reaction. The way these videos are usually formatted, you’ll see the streamer him or herself on one side of the stream reacting to whatever happened — oftentimes they’ll leap out of their chair, throw down their headset, and either dance or rage around the room, sometimes while actually screaming — and then you’ll see the chat going absolutely nuts, just a lightning-fast scrolling of reaction memes, in-jokes, and so on. When whatever just happened is good, it’s the rough, 2025 equivalent of a home crowd going wild when LeBron banks in a desperation 3-pointer to tie the game.

One genre of gaming is speedruns — can you beat a game faster than anyone else has? There’s a subset of streamers who focus on speedrunning games, and they run the gamut when it comes to game types (from classics like Super Mario Bros. to whatever came out last week) to the self-imposed rules they follow (do you have to get a certain number of items or complete a certain number of tasks during your run, or are you going Any%, meaning you simply beat the final boss as soon as possible?). Oftentimes, speedrunners will broadcast their stream next to a list of different milestones that help indicate how on track they are. For example, if the fastest-ever run of Government Bureaucracy Simulator is to have completed Form X-Z29 in one minute, 23 seconds, 49 centiseconds, a GBS speedrunner will have that information up on stream, and as soon as he has filled out Form X-Z29, the game will show his time next to the fastest-ever time, sort of similar to what you’ll see if you watch certain types of Olympic racing. If he has successfully filled out Form X-Z29 in 1:23:45, that will elicit an audience reaction, because it’ll show he’s on pace for a potentially world-record–breaking run.

As you’ve probably picked up, everyone involved in this is getting more and more addicted, because it’s just layers upon layers of variable reward schedules. Each run of the game offers the chance for something amazing or tragic to happen, every new comment posted to chat offers the chance for hilarity or ridicule or for someone to get banned, and on and on and on — it’s slot machines inside slot machines inside slot machines. Not only that, but the most successful streamers develop social and parasocial communities around them. If you regularly watch a given streamer, you’ll get to know the other people who show up in chat, there might be a Discord server, and on and on and on.

That’s why so many people spend so many hours streaming video games and watching streams of video games.

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Elon Musk keeps tweeting, fait-accompli–style, that DOGE has cut this or that government program or contract. So does the DOGE account, which is surely controlled by Musk or by someone very close to him. On January 24, for example, DOGE tweeted: “In the first 80 hours, approx $420M of current/impending contracts have been cancelled. 2 leases have also been cancelled. Initial focus is mainly on DEI contracts and unoccupied buildings.”

That’s one of DOGE’s supposed top goals — to root out DEI waste in the government (they often use DEIA, or diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility).

And wow, have the DOGE sleuths found a lot of DEIA waste in government. On January 29, for example, DOGE posted:

Through 1/29/2025, 85 DEIA related contracts totaling ~$1B have been terminated within the Dept. of Ed, GSA, OPM, EPA, DoL, Treasury, DoD, USDA, Commerce, DHS, VA, HHS, State, NSF, NRC, NLRB, PBGC, USAID, RRB, SSA, SBA, BLM, CFPB, NPS, and NOAA.

To date, DOGE and Musk have released precious few specifics about exactly what programs they are cutting or why. Instead, we’re getting charts like this one from DOGE, accompanied by the text “Updated data on DEI related contract cancellations with full detail:”

After every post from Musk or from DOGE, you’ll see reactions from Musk fans. These include real, famous humans, random fanboys, and large meme accounts. Here’s @WallStreetApes (785,000+ followers) reacting to one of the initial DOGE tweets: “Excellent work. It’s time to cut 90% of the federal government. Any way we can get a live stream of bureaucrats being told they’re terminated and will have to find a real job and have to survive on normal wages? Let’s do it!”