Elon Musk thinks Deus Ex is "". It's not exactly a hot take. But his taste in games also displays an impressive lack of self-awareness. Musk sees himself as an outsider and heroic figure taking on the status quo, despite being the world's richest man, the owner of X, and a sometimes-ally of Donald Trump.
When Musk rails against [[link]] 'the establishment', it's only when it threatens his vast fortune, his ability to indulge in hate speech, or when he's promoting conspiracies. Indeed, he posted during the Covid-19 lockdowns where he drew connections between essential measures to protect the vulnerable and the plot of Deux Ex, where a man-made pandemic is deployed by the world's richest man to advance a political power play.
Deus Ex—and Dishonored, which Grossman also wrote—is a game very much interested in the powerful, and the tools they use to control people. It's also an exploration of the ethics of transhumanism—an industry that Musk himself is extremely invested in.
Like most of us, Musk easily recognises who the villains of Deus Ex are—the problem is that he genuinely seems to believe that he is opposed to them, rather than being a more annoying, less capable, real-life version of AI-obsessed billionaire antagonist Bob Page.
Criticising Musk always comes with some risk. Alongside a baffling Sardaukar of vocal fanboys on X, "The Everything App", Musk himself will happily target his detractors with a level of glee and pettiness that is particularly strange when it comes from a man in his 50s who is in charge of several high-profile companies—something Grossman is prepared to weather should his online harassment ticket get punched.
In said interview, Grossman told the site that "Musk plainly imagines he's the [[link]] JC Denton of this world—a plainspoken everyman, standing up to the elite. As is obvious to everyone, Musk is the one with power and he's just pathologically incapable of honest introspection."