Since the early release of the Grand Theft Auto VI trailer this week, the internet has been embroiled in discussions about the series to date. This, of course, includes the World’s Most Online Man: Elon Musk, who took to what’s left of Twitter Monday night to declare that he “tried” Grand Theft Auto V, but couldn’t get into “doing crime.”
This is an interesting statement, from a man whose career is studded with more legal issues than Sunday dinner at the Soprano household. He’s been fined tens of millions by the SEC, investigated for sexual misconduct allegations revolving around trading an “erotic massage” for a horse, and his car company has 39 “safety-related” OSHA offenses on record. Hurting real people is fine, it seems, so long as no video game cops are caught in the crossfire.
The game section Musk describes here seem to be the flashback opening to Grand Theft Auto 5, in which the player participates in a bank heist. Curiously, Musk only mentions the police officers shot — not the mechanic in which the player can instill fear into civilian bank tellers by aiming a gun at them as a threat to their lives. Of course, the heist itself is also a crime, but that doesn’t seem to be an issue for Musk — the bank vault has to be emptied for the police to show up, so we know he made it that far.
Musk apparently purchased a game named for a crime, then committed multiple other crimes in it before meeting his breaking point: Being asked to kill virtual cops. Perhaps there’s some interesting prioritization to read into those actions — Musk had no issue following the game until it asked him to act against society’s disciplinarians. Punching down, whether against frightened bank tellers or wounded factory workers, seems to be fine.
There is, admittedly, a second option: Perhaps Musk, aspiring streamer that he is, just got to the game’s first combat section and discovered he sucked shit.