Because it's a dumb thing to lie about. This guy is part of the U.S. government now, so it's important to know if he's lying to us. This is something relatively inconsequential, but if he lies about more important things, well, that's not something you want in a government official.
Also, I'm bad at video games, but I don't care about that because they're fun to play. When you get someone else to do it for you you're taking all the fun out of it. I learned when I was younger that cheating ruins the experience. So if you're all about winning, that shows a lot of naivety.
1) it's really weird. He's the richest man in the world, and he's spending his time by pretending to be good at video games? Humanly, it's just darkly fascinating.
2) an important part of his public persona is that he's supposed to be genuinely super smart and capable at everything. Many employees and other related figures have attested to him having preternatural abilities at rocket and car engineering.
If he is willing to make under the table payments and shamelessly pass off other people's work as his own for such an insignificant feat as being good at video games, what does that say about his involvement with actually important things? The parallel is very easy to draw.
> Many employees and other related figures have attested to him having preternatural abilities at rocket and car engineering.
Do you have examples of this? In the past, I've looked for accounts of people who've worked with Musk praising his technical (not product, not sales/marketing) skillset, and I have been unable to find any firsthand accounts. Such an account would somewhat change my assessment of Musk.
> Many employees and other related figures have attested to him having preternatural abilities at rocket and car engineering.
I mean, one assumes that this is in the same sense that Kim Jong Un happens to be the world’s leading expert on whatever the factory he happens to be visiting does.
Nobody cares for people like me, but the consequences of the actions of this guy may now impact life of millions. Questionning his sanity, ethics, sense of priorities is always a matter of public interest. I don't know if HN is the place for that though.
Sheer curiosity. Good engineers and other technical people are often curious about how things fail. Elon Musk serves as one of the more interesting case studies in "How long can he possibly keep this up?!" since the late Howard Hughes.
Hughes's downward spiral occurred before most of us were old enough to watch it happen, so Musk is our next best chance.
