A crowd booed Twitter owner Elon Musk during the recent Valorant Championship. The controversial billionaire was in the audience and briefly appeared on screen, prompting an overwhelmingly negative reaction from the audience.
Valorant fans boo Musk, call for Twitter’s return
Saturday, August 26, marked the final day of the 2023 Champions tournament for Riot Game’s Valorant. The Grand Finale’s focus was supposed to be the showdown between Canadian team Evil Geniuses and Singaporean team Paper Rex. While Evil Geniuses ultimately took the grand prize, the crowd was briefly distracted when Elon Musk appeared on screen. The event staff had presumably hoped to highlight the presence of a celebrity in the audience. However, they didn’t seem to have anticipated the round of boos that accompanied Musk’s brief on-screen appearance.
As PC Gamer reported, a clip of the incident recently went viral on Twitter, which is at least a little ironic for Musk. “Where’s that coming from? That can’t be from in here, surely,” said one broadcaster. “Is that a bigger reaction than tenZ got,” another asked, referring to the prominent professional player. The broadcast quickly returned to the game, and it briefly appeared that the crowds’ reaction had died down. However, after one broadcaster commented on attention returning to the match, the audience began chanting for Elon Musk to “Bring back Twitter.”
The Space X founder purchased Twitter in October 2022 for about $44 billion after attempting to wiggle out of the deal. He went on to make several questionable decisions and mishandled the company’s financial obligations. The most visible change is the rebranding of Twitter to X, a change that most agree is for the worse. This is especially true considering how many people compared the platform’s new name to that of porn websites. Valorant’s esports fans don’t seem to like Musk’s changes to Twitter any more than most people do.
