Elon Musk's world rank in Diablo IV exposed by former Blizzard employee

It was only early last month Elon Musk appeared on the Joe Rogan Podcast, where he opened the show by discussing what he believes are the benefits of playing video games and also briefly touching on how he is one of the best Diablo IV players on Earth.

These claims aren't anything unusual from Musk, as the Tesla and SpaceX CEO discussed previously in interviews the time he spent playing several video games. As for the claims with Diablo IV specifically, Musk, at the time of the Rogan interview, held the 20th position for the fastest clear of The Pit, an end-game level piece of content that puts the player up against hordes of monsters. The goal is to beat The Pit in the fastest time possible, and according to Helltides.com, Musk's time of 2 minutes and 45 seconds earned him the 20th position on the website's leaderboards.

However, there are some caveats to this claim. Diablo IV doesn't have official leaderboard rankings, meaning Helltides' rankings consist of players who manually submit their clear times. Helltides is renowned as the go-to place for leaderboard rankings in Diablo IV. But that isn't the worst of the caveats. According to Pirate Software, or Jason Thor Hall, a previous engineer at Blizzard who worked on banning more than two million World of Warcraft accounts for in-game exploits, hacking, and other violations against ToS, Elon Musk is using an exploit within Diablo IV to achieve his world-renowned clear time of The Pit.

Here's what Pirate Software (Thor) said during a recent YouTube stream, "What I don't love is that people think he's a god gamer because he uses exploits in Diablo IV. And I'm going to be very serious about this. He's playing the spirit-born class. He's using the infinitely scaling damage effects of the spirit-born, which are a bug. Where they are not abiding by what their tool tip actually says, and he's doing trillions, actually quadrillions of damage per hit instead of anything else. It's the reason that class is broken right now.

He's using something called Viscous Shield, which is one of the talent points you can get on that class, and it's supposed to scale to 33% of your maximum HP, and instead, it does this based on the base HP of the class, which means you can do tens of thousands of bonus percentage damage on that character class. I know what that exploit is. I played the season, and I stopped playing the season because this exploit is in the game."

Thor isn't the only Diablo IV player to have noticed the bug, with gamers taking to Reddit to voice their complaints.