Video game fans boo Elon Musk at live event – here’s what they want from Tesla’s CEO

FANS of the video game Valorant did not hesitate to express their feelings for Elon Musk as the billionaire attended an esports event on Saturday.

Mr Musk made a surprise appearance at the Valorant Champions 2023 tournament finals in Los Angeles, but he didn’t get a warm welcome from the crowd.

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As the presence of the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX was highlighted during the live broadcast, the audience at Kia Forum in Los Angeles started booing him.

When the camera showed Elon Musk in between game rounds, loud jeers erupted from the crowd, even though his face was barely visible on the screens in the dark arena.

At first, the commentators seemed unsure how to react and where the boos were coming from and why.

Then, as they tried to continue with the game, the crowd broke into a chant of “Bring back Twitter”, clearly audible during the livestream.

Valorant fans’ demands refer to Elon Musk’s acquisition of social media network Twitter and his more recent decision to rebrand it as X.

The Tesla chief took over Twitter back in October 2022, as his $44bn deal to buy the social media company was finally sealed.

More recently, the “Chief Twit”, as Mr Musk used to style himself on Twitter after the acquisition, officially rebranded the site to X.

Rebranding Twitter meant ditching the iconic blue bird logo and light blue colour scheme for good.

The staggered rebrand also saw the disappearance of bird-related lingo from the social media site’s interface.

Right now “tweets” and “retweets” are no longer called like that but are officially known as “posts” and “reposts”.

Briefly after the unveiling of the new logo in July, Mr Musk wrote in a post that tweets should now be called “x’s”. [sic]

A video post by streamer Jake Lucky showing the moment when Elon Musk got booed went viral overnight and now has more than 11.6 million views at the time of this writing.

Reactions in the replies under the post were mixed, with some users seeing the crowd’s reaction as funny and/or righteous, and others defending the Tesla and SpaceX chief.

Some suggested that Elon Musk would “ban all Valorant content on Twitter” as a retaliation to the cold welcome he received from fans of the game at the event.

Others still expressed regret that the iconic blue bird was gone and joined the arena crowd in their demands to bring it back.

Written by Stoyan Ovcharov on behalf of GLHF.