DOGE mastermind Elon Musk took the recent No Kings protests in the US as the latest opportunity to reinforce his gamer cred with his followers on X, and once again his need for approval has blown up in his face.
“Anyone else think of this yesterday?” Musk posted on June 15 (or early June 16, depending on your time zone), the day after the No Kings protests against Trump’s presidency drew more than five million people across the US, according to supporters.
It was a pretty clear allusion to those anti-Trump demonstrations, especially in light of the ugly breakup between Trump and Musk earlier this month that saw Musk claim credit for Trump’s election victory and seek to imply that Trump kept company with child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, to which Trump responded by threatening to take away the massive US government subsidies that keep Musk’s companies afloat.
Anyway.
It all simmered down after a few days (Musk later apologized for his remarks), but some things you just can’t take back, and at first blush Musk’s “no gods or kings” post looked like he was rubbing Trump’s nose in it a bit, in a way that Trump probably wouldn’t get.
But then about a half-hour later, he put up another post with nearly the same quote—using “men” in place of “man”—above a video of a successful SpaceX rocket landing.
No gods or kings, only men pic.twitter.com/StNow0bb6RJune 16, 2025
The implication of this one is very different, seemingly casting Musk in the role of Andrew Ryan, the founder of the underwater city of Rapture in which BioShock takes place. The reaction to the post on X was a predictable slurry of cheers, insistence that there is a god (this seems to be the dominant response, at least among those surfaced by the algorithm), and a handful who want everyone to know they recognize the quote as a BioShock reference.
Over on the BioShock subreddit, though—a place where people tend to have at least a passing familiarity with BioShock, including the fact that Andrew Ryan was a villainous megalomaniac who meets his destiny at the wrong end of a golf club because he’d rather score a point than go to therapy—the reaction is quite a bit different.
A small smattering:
- “Of course he took away the wrong message and probably thinks Andrew Ryan was the hero.” – 4morian5
- “It’s like that Trump supporter trying to disrupt a voting line by blasting Rage Against The Machines – Bulls on Parade and danced to it.” – rainorshinedogs
- “Does he know what shit ended up happening in the end with Andrew Ryan’s dream?” – Andrianwill-87
- “We have come full circle. Where once we had people quoting Ayn Rand thinking they were the new John Galt (especially young men), now we have billionaires quoting Bioshock thinking they are the next Andrew Ryan. Praise be to the cycle, for it shows the pure idiocy of dudes with money they have never earned.” – hunkaliciousnerd
Others in the thread pointed out Musk’s analysis of the original Deus Ex a couple years ago, which inspired a similar response on the Deus Ex subreddit.
Musk repeated that misunderstanding of Deus Ex a few months later, attracting the attention of Robert F. Kennedy, who as the current secretary of Health and Human Services in the US was recently accused of disseminating “willful medical disinformation” to justify his decision to restrict access to vaccines among some people.
That’s irony, baby.
Another of Musk’s efforts to bolster his gamer cred involved demonstrating his Path of Exile 2 prowess, which ended in an awkward climbdown after it was revealed he’d been account boosting (followed by an absolutely savage burn inflicted by Ubisoft a couple months later).
It’s all very silly, but Musk’s latest swing-and-a-miss is starting to make me wonder if his vaunted gamer cred—which I admit I bought into as much as anyone a decade ago, before, y’know, everything—is perhaps just a wee little bit overstated. I would assume Musk does know how BioShock ends (it’s not exactly a big secret) and is just taking the classic ‘the bad guy is actually the good guy’ position, but I have to wonder why, especially given that Ryan is so clearly the problem—and does not exactly come to a good ending. It’s such a weird connection to make. I guess all that’s left now is to wait and see if Musk starts waxing poetic about Handsome Jack when Borderlands 4, which we very recently got to preview, drops in September.
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