Was Elon Musk once a famous Quake Player?

Elon Musk, probably the most famous entrepreneur at the moment, has declared that he was once one of the best Quake players in the world and even won money as a player. The billionaire explained this during an interview with Lex Fridman in a podcast.

While many people did not believe Elon Musk, other people from the former Quake scene later came forward and explained that Musk was indeed a Quake player. However, probably not as good as he had portrayed himself to be.

Elon used to be an active Quake player

In the podcast, Musk explained, “Killing the demons in a video game calms the demons in my head,” and then reminisced about his time as a Quake player.

“I’m 52 years old, so my reflexes aren’t what they used to be, but I’ve played video games my whole life,” Musk said. “At one point, I may have been one of the best Quake players in the world. I even won money in one of the first paid esports tournaments in the U.S. We ran four-person Quake tournaments and came in second.”

“I was the second best player on the team, and the best player… we were actually winning, we would have come first, but the best player on the team had a computer crash halfway through the game, so we came second. But I got money for it and everything. So basically I have skills. I’m not a spring chicken these days though.”

After the podcast, many people made fun of Musk and didn’t believe that he used to be so active in Quake.

But shortly afterward, old acquaintances of his came forward and confirmed that he really was a Quake player… albeit not as good as Musk had made him out to be. Some players even still remember him.

Wasn’t a particularly good player, but an OG

Dennis “Thresh” Fong, one of the best Quake players of the 90s, explained that he knew Musk.”Elon Musk is known as a great gamer, we used to play on the same Quake server, I saw him almost every day: Zip2 was his username.”

When Thresh is asked if Musk was a good gamer at all, he laughed and said: “He was okay. Ehrm… he wasn’t very good, but he’s still an OG, he’s legit when he says he’s a gamer, I saw him every day on that Quake server and a good buddy of mine ended up being the CIO for each of his companies.”

Later, Thresh even got back to Elon’s platform X / Twitter, and reiterated that Musk was around the scene a lot in the 90s: “FWIW, I can confirm that Elon Musk played a lot of Quake, so it’s real.We played on the same http://kitty1.stanford.edu servers a lot.”