I mean, he’s not the only person to hate chess, but I’ll take Bobby Fischer’s opinion, from someone with the credentials to match the opinionatedness, over Elon’s nonsensical non-reasoning (which boils down to “It’s abstract” and “this thing is what it is instead of being something else”).
And like Musk he has ideas for improvement:
I suspect Elno & Fischer would have plenty to bond over without chess…
Lol! When he described Chess’s “limitations” my first thought was “is he describing Civilization?”.
Well, yes. Yes he was. 
From the article:
Polytopia seems to be a metaphorical battlefield where Musk practices life’s strategies. His brother Kimbal Musk learned the game to understand his sibling’s mindset.
“He said it would teach me how to be a CEO like he was,” Kimbal Musk said.
It’s like the awful 80s stereotype of a cokehead suit with a copy of The Art of War to hone his Wall Street strats; but for low attention span mobile addicts.
Maybe this is just sneering elitism; but if someone is going to go on about how a video game made them the executive they are today I’d really hope it’d be something from the deepest depths of the intimidating grognard gearhead stuff that I only know about from a Sin Vega The Rally Point review where she described it as intimidating to come to grips with; not something bite-sized and cheerfully accessible by design. (in fairness, The Battle for Polytopia did receive favorable mention; but as “this summer’s low-intensity stratgegy game” of 2022 rather than, say, “too much for one article, and possibly one lifetime” like Terra Invicta.
Musk and his brother both learned basic life lessons from Polytopia, despite being fully grown adults decades before it was created.
There are explicit lessons that Musk and his circle have derived from the game, some of which are coined as “Polytopia Life Lessons.” Among these are notions like not fearing loss, being proactive in strategies and learning to pick your battles wisely. For Musk, life, much like “Polytopia,” gives you a finite number of turns, and missing any could mean not reaching ambitious goals like colonizing Mars.
I’m sure Musk fancies his…selective…approach to the autobiographical accuracy to be a bold, Nietzschean, rejection of slave causality.
Huge props for Player of Games reference. Well played m’lord!
See what I did there? I too can play Nth dimensional chess.
(Is this a quote quote now?)
Well, that’s one thing that definitely won’t happen within Leon’s lifetime, but being as detached from contemptuous of reality as he has become in recent years there is no way he’ll handle this situation like a sane adult.
In other words, Chess isn’t an open-ended space war game, and therefore it sucks. Or could it be that his significantly more intelligent PayPal Mafia colleague Peter Thiel kicked his ass so hard in Chess that his only coping mechanism is to disparage it?
Third possibility: His chess rant is just another example of his always annoying and ofttimes dangerous need to hyper-anal focus on the wrong things, surely a nightmare for shareholders, among others.
His trajectory is terminal.
Well, yeah, but what if in checkers, you could get DOUBLE KING!?
… isn’t the queen the space-laser piece?
We get more if we launch a pawn into orbit 
“There are even more possible variations of chess games than there are atoms in the observable universe.”
-Claude Shannon
Chess is an overrated game that rewards raw calculation and rote memorization over strategy, tactics and self expression and that’s coming from someone who learned to play at six. Chess is too honest of an game to be considered a strategy game.
With Musk this is one of those ‘broken clock being right twice a day’ sort of things and most likely an accidental revelation to him.
Elon Musk is the modern Alexander the Great; a destructive arsehole who doesn’t understand that breaking the rules isn’t the same as winning the game.
That’s not fair at all. Alexander the Great was violent, ambitious, emotionally unstable, but actually capable. He led from the front and risked himself more than was sensible. Musk’s leadership consists entirely of demanding other people take care of everything for him. His approach to the Gordian knot would be to have someone drag around the cart and post, and let everyone know he was just two years away from untying it. He’d love you to think he’s the modern Alexander, the modern Aristotle, the modern Aristophanes – anything besides the truth, which is that he’s a dumb charlatan who got lucky.
Fair point 
