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.
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.