Twitter Owner Elon Musk Is Now A Fallout: New Vegas Bad Guy

Fallout: New Vegas might be a 13-year-old game, but fans of Obsidian Entertainment’s open-world RPG continue to tinker with and release mods for it to this day. Hell, just this week, New Vegas received 88 new PC mods and one of them is hilariously on point, replacing one of the game’s main antagonists with X (formerly Twitter) owner Elon Musk, down to the cadence of his speech.

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Created by modder NoUsernameSelected, the Elon House mod turns Robert Edwin House into Elon Musk. In case you don’t remember, Mr. House, as he’s commonly referred to in the game, is the CEO and president of The Strip, a district located in the heart of New Vegas. While cult leader Edward “Caesar” Sallow is the de facto villain, Mr. House can serve as another big bad if you refuse to work with him. Technologically and mathematically brilliant, he’s also arrogant, looking down on plebeians and eventually becoming so full of himself that he believes he must rebuild civilization under his command to save humanity. It’s not hard to see why one modder had the bright idea of replacing the New Vegas Strip’s CEO with one of our era’s wealthiest and most impetuous business magnates.

This is where NoUsernameSelected came in. Using artificial intelligence software such as the text-to-speech synthesizer ElevenLabs, OpenAI’s automatic speech recognition system Whisper, and the deep-learning text-to-image generator Stable Diffusion, NoUsernameSelected was able to construct a remarkable and uncanny recreation of Elon Musk in Fallout: New Vegas.

NoUsernameSelected

As you can see, when the player walks up to the screen, which would normally contain Mr. House, they’re greeted by a soulless-looking Musk. With the player—presumably NoUsernameSelected—choosing dialogue options to chat with Mr. Musk, you can hear just how accurate the voice sounds.

In an email to Kotaku, NoUsernameSelected said this is the most impressive mod he’s made thus far. As a big fan of the Fallout series, NoUsernameSelected thought both figures—Elon Musk and Robert House—were surprisingly similar, and figured someone should swap the two. Taking inspiration from a 2020 mod that replaced Mr. House with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, NoUsernameSelected sought to bring his vision to life. But first, he had to learn how to use AI tools.

”I’m more or less self-taught,” NoUsernameSelected said, crediting the nonprofit research group EleutherAI with facilitating his learning. “I thought it would take a while to make because I was learning how to use some of the tools involved for the first time, but I actually put this together in less than 24 hours from start to finish. I already had the Elon picture just from messing around in Stable Diffusion a few weeks ago. The rest was basically just figuring out how to rip the game’s voice lines open, transcribe them with OpenAI Whisper, voice them with Elon’s AI voice on Elevenlabs, and put them back in the game. The overall API and subscription costs were only a few dollars for [about] 600 lines transcribed and voiced. With the right know-how, this kind of content is actually surprisingly easy to create.”

With his previous modding experience being only small personal projects that haven’t been shared anywhere, NoUsernameSelected explained that artificial intelligence wasn’t the only tool that helped him out here.

“I also did a bit of manual batch editing in Audacity to make him a bit more robotic like House’s original voice through his speakers, because it was too ‘real’ and crystal-clear compared to the original voice acting otherwise,” NoUsernameSelected said.

Kotaku has reached out to X for comment.

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It makes sense seeing Elon Musk replace the most arrogant and calculating character in Fallout: New Vegas. Considering that Mr. House has amassed colossal wealth but has little regard for how his decisions may impact the lives of others, the parallels between the two are close enough.

 

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Elon Musk Is Once Again Thinking About Elden Ring

Elon Musk, the man who once showed his ass to the entire internet with his terrible Elden Ring build, has the FromSoftware blockbuster on his mind once again. But this time, instead of boasting about his playstyle, it appears that the billionaire manchild is turning to Hidetaka Miyazaki’s world for design inspiration.

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X, formerly known as Twitter but changed to X in July 2023 to sate Musk’s edgelord whims, has recently undergone an app redesign, with the bluebird of Twitter replaced with a black, aslant X. Musk seems proud of the logo—so proud he put a massive, flashing X structure on top of Twitter’s San Francisco HQ that lasted just a few days before people complained about the “unpermitted structure.”

Determined to impart beauty upon this tragic world, however, Musk has not been deterred. On August 18, in one of his characteristically “very online” social media sessions, he shared “we need to make this interface far more beautiful” on his X timeline (god I wish I could just say Twitter). Fifteen minutes before that, he posted, “Elden Ring is some of the most beautiful art ever created.”

It’s unclear if Musk was up late playing Elden Ring or was just daydreaming about the sheer beauty that is Dung-Eater, but it’s obvious that, within minutes, he was thinking about both FromSoftware’s action RPG and the current design of the app he took over back in April 2022.

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During this spate of posts, Musk also said, “The Fast & The Fanciful: Tokyo Drift 2023,” (he’s in Tokyo right now) and suggested that the app is “humanity’s collective consciousness.” This all just makes me think that he got a hold of some seriously mid weed and was playing the role of older guy who bogarts the joint and won’t stop talking about how he’s more lion than man or some shit.

It’s unclear how or if Elden Ring will factor into Musk’s quest to make X more beautiful. Maybe he’ll set the site to a permanent Dark Mode (seems like a thing he’d consider “edgy”), or maybe he’ll make it so that every time you log off you’re greeted with a classic FromSoft “you died” screen. Maybe he’ll change the format of the user-generated Community Notes that address misinformation on the app so that they mimic the messages players can leave behind in Elden Ring. Or maybe, just maybe, he’ll take a page out of Iron Fist Alexander’s book and demand that we duel him so he can disappear forever afterwards. He does want to fight Mark Zuckerberg, after all… so here’s hoping.

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Elon Musk Booed At Valorant Tournament

A photo shows Elon Musk giving two thumbs up before receiving the Axel Springer Award 2020 In Berlin.

Photo: Pool (Getty Images)

Elon Musk, head nit-twit and “Player of Games,” appeared surprised when he attended the Valorant Champions 2023 tournament at the Kia Forum in Los Angeles, California and was greeted with a cacophony of boos.

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During the August 27 grand finals match between Canadian team Evil Geniuses and the Singaporean team Paper Rex, the Valorant Twitch feed cut to a shot of Elon Musk sitting in the crowd. The crowd was quick to recognize Musk and immediately booed the billionaire before the feed quickly cut away from him to show a replay from the match at hand. h. The crowd’s visceral reaction to seeing Musk’s face confused one of the commentators, prompting them to ask “Where’s that coming from, that can’t be from in here, surely,” before asking whether the reaction was bigger than the crowd pop that Valorant player tenZ had received.

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As if to clear up any confusion regarding who their vitriol was directed towards, the audience started chanting “Bring back Twitter.” Their spontaneous chant was made all the more deliciously ironic considering it started just when the commentators said the crowd was re-focusing on the championship game. In case you were curious about which team actually won the Valorant tournament that Musk’s brief on-screen appearance temporarily overshadowed, it was Evil Geniuses. You can check out the video below.

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This isn’t the first time Musk’s mere presence was met with a sea of boos. Last December, comedian and self-proclaimed TERF, Dave Chappelle, brought Musk up on stage which led the crowd to boo the emerald mine nepobaby. It was as pathetic as it sounds. However, this time around there was no Chappelle (or an army of Musk’s fake Twitter followers) around to cushion the crowd’s hostile reaction with a pathetic attempt to glaze him up by noting how rich he is to combat the crowd’s boos. Not many people can say they’ve been on the receiving end of boos from Valorant and Chappelle fans but then again no one’s fucking up the game of life quite like Musk.

   

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Elon Musk Ex Amber Heard Wanted To Do Overwatch Cosplay For Him

Writer Walter Isaacson spent two years following Twitter overlord Elon Musk as he worked on his biography Elon Musk, which released September 12. That thorough work paid off—readers can sleep easy knowing that one of the richest men in the world might be into Overwatch roleplay.

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Actress Amber Heard, who dated known gamer Musk through 2016, and then on-and-off in 2017, looked like popular support hero Mercy to him, Isaacson writes. While pretty much every Overwatch character is featured in tons of lovingly made porn online, Mercy is particularly popular, especially in a subsect of the BDSM community (“healsluts”) that feels erotic pleasure from healing in-game.

Musk, apparently, “looked attractive for a rocket engineer,” Isaacson continues. Though another one of Musk’s waifish exes, Claire Boucher, better known as the musician Grimes, tells Isaacson that her “Dungeons and Dragons alignment would be chaotic good, whereas Amber’s is probably chaotic evil,” Musk nevertheless started pursuing Heard as early as 2013. Ultimately, while Heard was filming Aquaman in Australia in 2017, Isaacson writes, Musk flew out to see her, and she kissed him on the cheek.

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“[Musk] told her that she reminded him of Mercy, his favorite character in […] Overwatch, so she spent two months designing and commissioning a head-to-toe costume so she could role-play for him.” That process was likely very involved for Heard. A full Mercy outfit requires faithful recreation of the character’s iconic white-blocked bodysuit, gold halo headpiece, and soaring, mechanical wings, which cosplayers sometimes like rigging with complicated lights or stiff plastic.

“I guess I could be called a geek for someone who can also be called a hot chick,” Heard told Isaacson.

But sexy geekery is tragically a poor glue. Heard and Musk’s relationship came apart soon after that, in part because of a taste for theatrics and upheaval Isaacson ascribes to both parties.

“Elon loves fire,” Heard told Isaacson, “and sometimes it burns him.”

That evidently also applies to his fascination with FromSoftware’s open-world role-playing game Elden Ring, which he’s both privately and publicly enthused about. Isaacson reports Musk spent “a lot of time in the game’s most dangerous regions, a fiery-red demon hellscape known as Caelid” before deciding to buy Twitter.

In that case, I hope his most recent wispy, back-and-forth girlfriend, 30-year-old actress Natasha Bassett, was able to complete her Alexander, Warrior Jar cosplay before they broke up again.

 

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Elon Musk Brought A Gun To A Cyberpunk 2077 Recording Session

During Cyberpunk 2077′s development, Elon Musk begged developer CD Projekt Red to give him a cameo by interrupting ex-girlfriend (and mother of at least three of Musk’s at least 11 children) Grimes’ voice acting sessions with a gun, Walter Isaac’s new biography Elon Musk reveals.

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Grimes was recording lines for Lizzy Wizzy, a bioengineered pop star and murder bot in the action-adventure role-playing game, Isaacson writes, before Musk “showed up at the studio wielding a two-hundred-year-old gun.” I’d guess that this vintage gun is the replica flintlock pistol Musk keeps on his bedside table, but I wouldn’t put it past him to have as many two-hundred-year-old guns as he has children.

“The studio guys were like sweating,” Grimes told Isaacson. However, ultimately, CD Projekt Red rewarded Musk with a small cameo.

“I told them that I was armed but not dangerous,” Musk said to Isaacson about the incident.

The biography suggests Musk fixated on Cyberpunk partly because the game’s prevalent cybernetic implants reminded him of his company Neuralink, which is dedicated to brain-computer interfaces (and was recently FDA-approved for human trials), and partly because he thought the game looked “like the future.”

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While discussing designs for the unreleased Tesla Cybertruck, first announced in 2019, Musk routinely referenced the Cyberpunk 2077 trailer, alongside “the car from the video game Halo,” and Blade Runner (1982).

“His son Saxon […] had recently asked an offbeat question that resonated: ‘Why doesn’t the future look like the future?’” Isaacson writes. “Musk would quote Saxon’s question repeatedly.”

“He’s not good at reading the room,” Grimes said. “My favorite version of E is the one who’s down for Burning Man and will sleep on a couch, eat canned soup, and be chill.” Put the gun down, man.

 

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Elon Musk Ditches Diablo 4 To Livestream Mexican Border

South African-Canadian immigrant Elon Musk promised on September 27 that he’d test livestreaming on X (you know it as Twitter) “with some silly stuff,” he said, like a Diablo IV speedrun with no powerful Malignant Heart add-ons. On September 28, he decided to livestream the Texas-Mexico border in Eagle Pass, a five-hour drive from the border town he supposedly lives in, instead.

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With an awkward black cowboy hat sitting on his head and a black Dead Space shirt clinging to his red skin, Musk had the look of what he thinks is a real Texan (“My hat is ten years old,” he insisted. “I’ve hip-fired a 50 cal while walking”) concerned about “the border crisis.” He’s hoping his stuttering, freezing “citizen journalism” livestream will change the world, he wrote on Twitter.

But, unlike the powerful pieces of citizen journalism that provide primary-source insight into some of the world’s biggest crises, Musk did not organically capture the Texas border; he interviewed a local congressman and sheriff about “the illegals” and all the cars they’re stealing.

“All over the country,” Sheriff Randy Brown said.

“New York City is buckling under the load [of immigration] already,” Musk wrote on Twitter. This year, NYC reached its peak of homes-per-person since 1940, though many residents can’t afford to live in any of them.

Can Elon Musk solve the border crisis?

“As an immigrant to the United States,” Musk said during his stream, “I am extremely pro-immigrant. I believe that we need a greatly expanded legal immigration system.”

“But, then, by the same token, we should also not be allowing people in the country if they’re breaking the law,” continued Musk, who is currently facing criminal investigation by the Department of Justice. “That doesn’t make sense. The law is there for a reason.”

I have a personal relationship with immigration, too—both of my parents are immigrants, and throughout my life, I’ve seen the challenges that status guarantees you if you, unlike Musk, do not have a father to allegedly fund your move through emeralds. Immigrants whose lives are not studded with emeralds face a number of dehumanizing challenges once over the border, including a higher poverty rate than citizens, family separation, and a justice system built to crush them.

Immigration is a gargantuan, global and historical issue—the first “real Americans,” as we now understand that term, were law-breaking immigrants—and its many scar marks aren’t going to be massaged away by one billionaire…at least not one who keeps all his money.

“Pronouns in bio means the woke mind virus ate your brain,” Musk said on Twitter 16 minutes after writing that “Illegal immigration needs to stop.” Ugh, all his inflammatory opinions are giving me a headache. Next time, stick to Diablo IV.

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Elon Musk Livestreams Diablo IV On Twitter

Elon Musk followed up on a September proclamation that he’d test out video game livestreaming on X (Twitter), with a run through Diablo IV’s most difficult Tier 100 Nightmare dungeon. The October 2 stream was an unprecedented success, in the sense that it happened with—as far as I can tell—zero race-baiting. However, pervasive technical difficulties make it unlikely that X will soon be a serious streaming platform.

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Musk made a burner account—@cyb3rgam3r420—to troubleshoot Twitter’s streaming capabilities for an hour, and to debut his lighting setup: a few candles in an otherwise unlit room. “For atmosphere,” Musk said about the candles.

His character, named IWillNvrDie (though Musk died three times in a later Diablo stream on his main account, once because he got annihilated by a bursting blood blister), is a werewolf Druid. He uses mostly Earth skills like Claw and the Earthern Bulwark shield, and he wields gear that complements his Storm Wolf build well, like the Greatstaff of the Crone.

“Sensible picks,” Kotaku video lead Eric Schulkin told me over Slack. “Where is he streaming from, a crypt?”

Aside from Musk’s questionable room lighting, his practice stream looked and sounded all right. On his official stream, though, Musk fretted over whether he sounded like a chipmunk—he did. The stream “upped sound frequency by 4 kHz,” he said on Twitter. The screen flickered lazily, like Musk’s tall, two-wick candle, making Musk’s silent gameplay nearly unwatchable.

Unlike Twitch or YouTube, Twitter doesn’t show live comments (which only subscribers can leave) on screen, so Musk would also sometimes drop the game entirely to giggle at his phone.

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“Chat room too full, ha ha ha ha,” he said.

At the end of his play session, Musk noted that Twitter has “a lot of things to improve” in its streaming. You might wonder how Musk finds spare time to grind to level 100 in Diablo, manage his plethora of businesses, and find time to be a good father to his 11 or so children. I don’t think he does. Court records from September 29 indicate that Musk’s ex-girlfriend and mother of at least three of his kids, Grimes (Claire Boucher), sued him for parental rights. And, well, Twitter’s as ruined as a Diablo dungeon.

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