Over the last few weeks, Elon Musk admitted to cheating at video games. While the entire story is supremely embarrassing for him, I am also offended on a fundamental level as a gear guy. Even if Musk were good at games, what I’ve seen of his streaming setup sucks – either through poor choices or bad implementation. This would be excusable if he was 12 years old and streaming Minecraft in his spare time, but he’s one of the richest men on Earth.
I do not know Musk’s current gaming setup, and it very well could have improved recently. Sometimes he appears to stream remotely on a laptop, such as on January 15th, 2025, when he streamed from Mar-a-Lago or on January 7th when he mentions the laptop. Musk used to appear on camera, but in the last half year or so has stopped. Most of my speculation stems from “test” streams he did on his annoyingly named gamer alt @cyb3rgam3r420 in 2023 and 2024.
His lighting situation at one point was a giant candle like a fucking vampire.
The first thing that strikes me about Musk’s streaming setup is the atrocious lighting and camera situation he had when appearing on camera. He appeared to be lit almost exclusively by the glow of his monitor and at least one large child-sized candle, which he calls a “gaming candle.” You can see it being lit by an assistant in the background at one point during a stream on January 4th, 2024. During the same stream, which has at least 400,000 views according to X’s metrics, he spent a decent amount of time arranging this candle in the background. It is one of the most severely uncomfortable things I have ever seen the man do, which is impressive. A candle is historically not a particularly good source of light for a camera, but maybe he was trying a really elaborate ketamine Dracula bit. If that’s the case I wish him luck in his goal to be the first pro gamer illuminated entirely by candelabra ala Barry Lyndon.
He center-aligned his taskbar at least once.
In one test broadcast on September 17th, 2024, you briefly see his dock in Windows which is center-aligned. This is the default for Windows 11, and I’m sorry if this offends but it’s incorrect. I understand using Windows 11 since Microsoft is going to make Windows 10 end of life soon, but for god’s sake bare minimum align your taskbar left, it’s not that hard to change in the settings. Also, he uses Streamlabs OBS, which I have never personally liked over regular OBS.
He appears to be sitting in an awful gaming chair.
I know that a lot of people like gaming chairs, but for the most part they are not well-made objects. They disintegrate quickly, provide awful support and heat regulation and are not easy to repair. Gaming chairs are attractive to a lot of people because they’re flashy and generally cost less than 500 dollars new.
At one point in 2023 Musk appeared to have a Razer chair (not good) but later he uses another chair that I cannot identify no matter how many times I attempt to put it through Google Reverse Image search. Perhaps that chair is custom made, but if that’s the case it looks like custom made garbage.
Even if you are super attached to the idea of a gamer chair, they make really high end gaming chairs now. Or, I don’t know, just get a nice office chair. Musk is worth hundreds of billions of dollars and he’s dicking around with something that looks like you’d find by a dumpster at Best Buy that would give you a hernia, which deeply offends my sensibilities as someone who has literally found thousand dollar Herman Miller and Knoll chairs in a dumpster.
He does not appear to always understand how HDR works.
Something that happens quite frequently when I get clips for my show Highlight Reel is that people send me washed-out footage. This is usually because they’re playing a game in HDR. If you’re a streamer, color space is something you have to account for when you’re setting your stream up or are recording video, otherwise your video will look like low contrast, desaturated garbage.
This is how some of Musk's streams and videos look (for example here, here, here, here, here, here and here), which is forgivable if you’re just an amateur, but if you’re rich you can also pay someone to make your videos halfway decent. He even technically owns a streaming platform, albeit one overwhelmingly used by losers.
He often uses a gaming headset instead of a decent pair of headphones and a real mic.
For a lot of first time streamers, a gaming headset seems ideal: it radically simplifies your setup by combining a basic mic with a basic headset. If you’re just shooting the shit with your friends on voice chat it’s not a terrible compromise, but most of the time you end up with the worst of everything: bad audio quality, cheap construction and an ugly product.
Musk appears to be using some consumer-grade Corsair headset with an awful-looking RGB light at the mic tip in some of his videos. At one point during a January 2024 stream it sounds like he attempted to place some kind of mic on his desk, but it was poorly-positioned and aimed squarely at his keyboard. Roughly 30 minutes in you can see him quickly ask the candle assistant to switch back to his headset mic.
Some of his more recent streams where he does not appear on camera are done remotely on a 3-year-old laptop while traveling, according to a steam on January 7th, 2025, which might help explain why the audio quality is atrocious.
He looks like he’s sitting too close to a corny, curved screen.
I do not have a curved screen, but I understand the appeal: the feeling of being swaddled in a cocoon of gaming seems intoxicating. As a part of a nice system that’s fine, but coupling it with an otherwise mid battlestation and room is deeply corny.
There’s also some basic ergonomic rules you need to follow if you’re going to game with a big ass monitor. Distance is important; you need to be able to see what is happening on the entire screen. In videos, he appears to be way too close (you can see him engaging with the screen in the “candle guy” stream on January 4th, 2024). That said, my main objection is to someone pairing a meme monitor with a bad keyboard.
His keyboard situation has been dire.
I don’t know what Musk’s current keyboard setup is, but based on what I’ve seen and heard from his various streams, it has been largely bad. The clearest photos of his setup were in response to a Twitter post by Lex Freidman in September 2023. In it he appears to be using an OK but not great Logitech mouse. He also appears to have a pretty solid SteelSeries mousepad. If I had a billion dollars I would have gone with something nicer like an Artisan, but I understand 3,400 yen is breaking the bank for most people.
What really gets me is the totally mediocre keyboard setup. At one point he uses something that looks like a Logitech K650 (or a Logitech K740 in the photo posted by Lex), which is a garbage, wireless rubber dome keyboard that’s barely acceptable for office work. In another video filmed by Shivon Zilis on Christmas Eve in December of 2023, you can hear Musk slamming on his keyboard and mouse and producing whatever the direct opposite of ASMR is. I have spent a lot of time listening to the sounds of various key switches and caps, I have soldered several keyboards from scratch, and that is by far one of the worst-sounding keyboards I have ever heard in my life.
Gear doesn’t matter, but this is embarrassing.
If you’re reading this blog and take streaming or competitive play even halfway seriously, you probably have a better setup than what you’ve seen here. None of this stuff is out of the reach of the average person any more, and there has never been more information out there about how to start streaming correctly.
Musk might have other gaming setups than the one shown in these videos, and I’m sure he could spend a bunch of money to have someone with taste fix his busted-ass setup so it looks and sounds halfway decent. And while I do admit that gear mostly does not matter that much if you have a limited budget but know what you’re doing, it does when you are one of the richest men on Earth. Musk constructs his gaming setup the way he builds his characters in Elden Ring: poorly optimized.
I am aware that this is one of the most frivolous things I could be writing about in a time when many of my friends' lives are at risk, but this is also a thing I take very seriously as a tech writer, a video producer, a gamer and a person who tries to live their life deliberately. Musk wants to be perceived as intelligent and epic, but his gaming setup looks like something put together by someone without the patience or self-awareness to learn to do things correctly. If he has the capacity for shame left in him, he should at least try interrogating how mid his battlestation is and seeing where that leads.
