Billionaire Elon Musk, the richest man on Earth, thinks that chess is dumb. Why? Because of space lasers, apparently.

In an X-formerly-Twitter post yesterday, the SpaceX CEO railed against the centuries-old strategy game, arguing that chess is overly simplistic — and far too fair — compared to real life and is thus useless.

But does Musk actually understand the point of chess at all? Does he think he's simply too good for the game?

"Chess has a tiny number of degrees of freedom compared to reality," he wrote. "Only 64 squares, no fog of war, no tech tree, no terrain differences, same starting pieces & positions every time and you can't invent new pieces during the game."

"All of those factors and more are present in reality," Musk continued. "So it may seem like someone is close to checkmate in reality, but that doesn't matter if they suddenly vaporize the opponent's king with lasers from space that never existed before!"

He concluded with the note that "understanding winning moves in reality" is an even harder task than understanding those in chess.

And, well.. yeah. Reality is indeed more complex than chess, because chess is a game, and reality is the real world.

Musk's attempted analogy was arguably a bad one. But butchered narrative devices aside, we'd be remiss not to point out that this is far from the first time the billionaire has taken to the internet to assail the 1,500-year-old strategy game.

And taken together, it's hard not to ask: does Elon Musk understand chess?

For instance, just about two years ago, in October 2022, Musk took to Twitter to explain that he played chess "as a child," but as a youth apparently already "found it to be too simple to be useful in real life."

In near-identical fashion, he listed the basic facts of the game as evidence for his argument, writing that chess takes place on "a mere eight by eight grid, no fog of war, no technology tree, no random map or spawn position, only two players, both sides exact same pieces, etc."

And a few months before that, in March 2022, Musk once again used his Twitter account to describe chess as a "simple game" that was "understandable when all we had to play with were squirrels and rocks, but now we have computers." (This particular comment prompted a response from the American chess grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura, who shot back a to-the-point "I literally don't care.")

In other words, across the (proverbial, non-chess) board, Musk's general argument against the game is that it's just too simple – the intonation being that it's too simple for him.

Or, perhaps, the billionaire's well-documented obsession with strategy games like Polytopia has robbed him of the enthusiasm required to enjoy a round of chess.

To be sure, Musk was on his South African high school's chess "A" team, so he was at least better at the game than some of the other kids in his classes. Maybe, though, if he'd stuck with the game longer, he would have understood that the confines of chess are the entire point.

Sure, variants exist, and gameplay can be surprising. But if you lose, it's never because an unknown space king is sending space lasers to vaporize you; you might not see an opponent's move coming, but you always have complete information about a board and the pieces in play. In short, there's nothing to blame, other than yourself. It's brutal!

It's completely fine not to like to do something, of course. But Musk's repeated and frankly goofy attacks on the ancient strategy game as just too simplistic for him may actually offer a salient glimpse into the billionaire's mind. After all, this is someone who allegedly surrounds themselves with sycophants; whose employees have reportedly felt forced to laugh at his bad jokes about the number 69; who often sets timelines that he consistently fails to keep; and who, if his rockets blow up, can chalk it up to an undiagnosed "anomaly" and move on to the next one.

In other words, he either needs to be the king with space lasers, or needs one to blame. Give the guy a set grid and even playing pieces, and the emperor risks wearing no clothes.

"He 100 percent was that kid who threw 'gun' in rock/paper/scissors," one X user observed.

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