The world’s richest gamer has seen to it that he can plug in whenever he likes at his bureaucratic office in Washington, D.C., according to a report from Politico.
The article, published Wednesday, takes a close look at the inner circle of oligarch and top White House vizier Elon Musk, whose so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) claims it has saved billions in government spending — but has routinely misrepresented the scale and nature of those cuts. That group includes politically inexperienced Silicon Valley executives, many of them pulled from Musk’s sprawling business empire, though he’s also grown close with Vice President J.D. Vance and the “ideological hardliners” guiding the second administration of President Donald Trump.
Musk’s top political adviser is Chris Young, a longtime GOP field organizer who joined his team as he spread around hundreds of millions of dollars from his Super PAC, America PAC, to help elect Trump in 2024. Young is serving as treasurer of that organization in addition to consulting the de facto DOGE chief on policy and carrying out directives to infiltrate and upend federal agencies. But his responsibilities apparently extend even to secretarial tasks: “Upon Musk’s request, Young procured a massive TV for Musk’s office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building so he could play video games, according to a person familiar with the situation granted anonymity to speak freely,” Politico reported.
Musk is an avid gamer and has often expressed his admiration for the strategy game The Battle of Polytopia — which according to his biographer Walter Isaacson once triggered a serious couple’s spat between him and his former partner, the musician Grimes — as well as the Diablo and Path of Exile series, both action role-playing games. Before he became fully enmeshed in Beltway drama, he occasionally streamed himself playing the most recent titles in both series, and cultivated the impression that he was a top-ranked player in both. Yet other gamers noted how despite piloting maximally powerful characters, he struggled with certain basic elements of gameplay, particularly in the difficult Path of Exile 2. Eventually, Musk confessed to what many viewers had surmised: that he outsourced the many hours of work it takes to level up a virtual character, or “grinding,” to other people.
Since that admission, right around Trump’s inauguration in January, Musk has hardly mentioned gaming, apart from touting the ability of Grok, the AI model created by his company xAI, to recreate versions of classic arcade games. (He has also taken a couple of shots at video game journalists, echoing the refrain of Gamergate more than a decade after that reactionary hate campaign began.) So it’s hard to say what Musk might be playing on his giant office television, or when he finds the time to log on amid his many meetings with Trump, White House officials, and DOGE, not to mention his obligations as the head of companies looking to innovate in the automotive sector, space exploration, biotech, and AI, and the near-constant posting on his social media platform, X. Known as a highly irregular sleeper, it’s possible he’s gaming well past midnight — Musk has claimed to be holing up in his office overnight.
Whichever hours Musk sets aside for this hobby, the very presence of a video game setup in his work space somewhat contradicts his stated mission of ferreting out “waste, fraud, and abuse” in government programs. DOGE has illegally fired thousands of federal workers and demanded that others send memos detailing their productivity, and the man behind it all could be battling virtual monsters in a fantasy world as he makes the call about which vital agency or service should be gutted next. No wonder it’s feeling like game over for America.
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