Every so often, a video game franchise decides it has had enough of a billionaire’s hot takes. In the blue corner stood Assassin’s Creed Shadows, a stealthy historical romp that had already spent months dodging culture-war arrows. In the red corner loomed Elon Musk, a man whose gaming credentials apparently had more layers than a Diablo dungeon—many of them, as the world later learned, outsourced.

After Musk decided to weigh in on Twitch streamer Hasan Piker’s paid promotion for Assassin’s Creed Shadows in late March 2025, the official Assassin’s Creed Twitter account skipped diplomacy and went straight for the jugular. The result was a 280-character parry that turned a slow-burn feud into a full-blown comedy.

How the Beef Started

The grudge began in May 2024, when Ubisoft revealed the game and a loud faction of online critics could not handle the fact that a Black protagonist, Yasuke, was front and center in 16th-century Japan. Musk waded into the mess with the claim that 'DEI kills art' and that Assassin’s Creed Shadows proved it. Ubisoft executive producer Marc-Alexis Côté did not exactly send a gift basket in response, calling the comment unproductive and saying Musk was feeding hatred before the game had even released.

By March 2025, Musk spotted Hasan Piker posting a clearly disclosed paid promotion for the game. The billionaire called Hasan a fraud, then upgraded the insult to sell-out, and declared that, objectively, Hasan was promoting a terrible game just for money. The word 'objectively' did a lot of heavy lifting, considering the speaker had already been caught in a small gaming fib.

The 280-Character Assassination

That was when the official Assassin’s Creed account asked the question that launched a thousand memes: 'is that what the guy playing your Path of Exile 2 account told you?'

For the uninitiated, this was not a random swing. Musk had recently admitted to boosting his Path of Exile 2 account—paying someone else to grind levels and rankings on his behalf. The confession arrived only after the internet noticed something suspicious: his account was active while Musk was publicly seen elsewhere. Unless the man had perfected the ancient assassin art of being in two places at once, something was off.

The Path of Exile 2 account, bless its overworked code, was grinding away while its owner was apparently doing real-life billionaire things. That is one dedicated little account. Let’s be real: nobody wants to be caught paying for bragging rights in a loot-filled dungeon. The internet collectively replied, 'Sure, Jan.'

A Quick Scoreboard

To understand the stark contrast between the trash talk and commercial reality, a little table helps:

Musk also admitted to boosting his Diablo 4 account, which made his earlier claim of being among the world’s top 20 players in that game land with the force of a wet lucre. Some social media users labeled the act of paying to boost a game account as a sign of insecurity and desperation to be liked. Musk insisted everyone does this. That is a bit like saying everyone robs banks after being caught with a ski mask in the vault, but okay.

Meanwhile, the Actual Game Was Fine

In the real world, Assassin’s Creed Shadows was doing just fine without the approval of the man who would be king of Mars. The game surpassed 2 million players in less than 48 hours of its March 20, 2025 release, making it the second-largest launch in franchise history, trailing only Assassin’s Creed Valhalla. That previous record, for the record, was inflated by a global pandemic and a Viking media renaissance, so Shadows had a steeper hill to climb.

Industry veterans also refused to take the bait. Bayonetta creator Hideki Kamiya waved off the outrage, saying normal people don’t care for Assassin’s Creed Shadows controversies and that he was glad the game was doing well critically and commercially. That was the polite version of telling the culture-war industrial complex to go touch grass. 🎮😭

By 2026, the saga remains a case study in how not to critique a piece of art while secretly paying someone to level up your wizard. The shadows have since moved on, the game racked up more players, and the official Assassin’s Creed account presumably returned to posting stealth tips and hidden-blade ASMR. But somewhere on the timeline, that single question still gleams like a perfectly timed assassination.

Expert commentary is drawn from OpenCritic, a widely used review-aggregation hub that helps contextualize how a release like Assassin’s Creed Shadows lands beyond the social-media noise—useful when weighing viral “objectively bad” claims against broader critical reception, reviewer consensus, and cross-outlet patterns that often correlate more closely with sustained player interest than any single influencer feud.