Everyone Is Roasting Elon Musk Over The Reason He Doesn’t Play The ‘Grand Theft Auto’ Games

It took a decade, but on Monday, Rockstar Games finally released the trailer for the Florida-set Grand Theft Auto VI. The previous game in the series, Grand Theft Auto V, is the second best-selling video game of all-time, behind only Minecraft, with over 190 million copies sold. That’s over $11.1 billion in sales, or nearly five times as much as the highest-grossing movie ever (Avatar).

Excitement is high. For everyone except Elon Musk and his cronies, that is.

After the Grand Theft Auto VI trailer was released, an X user and employee who goes by @KettlebellLife wrote, “A list of games I have not played: GTA1 GTA2 GTA3 GTA4 GTA5 GTA6.” Musk replied to the contrarian take by saying that he’s “tried” playing GTA before, but he “didn’t like doing crime. GTA5 required shooting police officers in the opening scene. Just couldn’t do it.”

This conservative talking point straight out of the 1990s — about aggressively violent video games like Doom or even the original Grand Theft Auto causing real-life violence — has been debunked time and time again. From Fortune, based on research from the Stanford Brainstorm lab:

We spent months reviewing 82 medical research articles that encompass all the reputed literature and scholarship in the field for any studies with any sort of causal link between playing video games and violent behavior. In short, current medical research and scholarship have not found any causal link between playing video games and gun violence in real life.

Musk (and Ian Miles Cheong, the Waylon Smithers to his Mr. Burns) not enjoying GTA because he doesn’t like “doing crime” is as silly as a vegan refusing to play Super Mario Bros. Wonder because they don’t want to crush turts. Here are some of the funniest reactions to his virtue signaling:

(Via X/Elon Musk)