Elon Musk wanted to join in the criticism of Assassin's Creed Shadows, but it seems he inadvertently helped sell at least a few copies of the game after the official Ubisoft account decided to fight back.
Mark Kern, better known as Grummz on social media, a former game director at Blizzard Entertainment (1997-2005) and co-founder and CEO of Red 5 Studios, which worked on Firefall, is an active campaigner against DEI in gaming. On his X account, he notably criticized Ubisoft for buying Assassin's Creed Shadows ads from streamer HasanAbi, a comment that was echoed by billionaire Elon Musk.
The CEO of Tesla, SpaceX, and owner of X and AI startup xAI responded that Hassan was a fraud and that he was "objectively promoting a terrible game just for the money." This post didn't go unnoticed by Ubisoft's SMM manager, who asked Musk if the guy who plays Path of Exile 2 on his account told him this.
At the time of writing, Musk's comments had garnered 16,000 and 44,000 likes, respectively, while Ubisoft's response had nearly 400,000. Some users of X and other social media platforms later began writing that they had purchased Assassin's Creed Shadows after seeing Ubisoft's response.
Assassin's Creed Shadows has the second-most successful launch in the franchise's history behind Valhalla, garnering over two million players in just two days of release. Analysts estimate that Shadows could garner around six million players in its first month, which would again put the game behind only Valhalla, which had an incredibly successful release window.
As a reminder, Elon Musk was previously caught playing Path of Exile 2 during a live broadcast. Later, the billionaire himself admitted that he paid others to level up his accounts in PoE 2 and Diablo IV.