For whatever reason, Genshin Impact has included getting Elon Musk to stream the game as part of a social media community goal. The official tweet can be found here, and says:
Dear Travelers, To celebrate reaching 2 Million followers and then some, Paimon has decided to host a community challenge! Follow Ella Musk
@Paimon2theMoon and check out the image below for what will happen when each milestone is reached!
- When 500K fans follow, @GenshinImpact will be renamed back to Paimon
- When 1M fans follow, @GenshinImpact will follow @elonmusk
- When 3M fans follow, @GenshinImpact will invite @elonmusk to stream Genshin Impact
- When 5M fans follow, CEO Dawei will invite Elon Musk to visit miHoYo HQ
The official English Genshin account itself has 2.4 million followers, with the Japanese account having 1.5 million. Ella Musk’s account at present has 22.6K followers, and has been used as a Content Creator Spotlight to feature fanworks.
To say that fans are bewildered is probably an understatement. Ella Musk is a relatively minor NPC in Genshin Impact, with her name often attributed to be a reference to Elon Musk. She is tied to learning the Hilichurlian language, wanting to communicate with the very common enemy in the game’s world.
It’s probably very unlikely the staggering follow “goals” would be reached, but the act itself has likely gotten the game (and Elon himself) to trend. Is this a “fun” way to promote the game? You decide.
After the fairly recent debacle over the anniversary rewards of which we have covered extensively prior, doing such a “challenge” seems pretty poor in taste and / or sense. If it gave out more tangible rewards, the community might be more willing to do it for laughs, but as it stands, there’s barely any value in trying.
UPDATE: The tweet has since been deleted, but not before the internet reacted to it.