The Genshin Impact Twitter account started a community challenge that asked players to follow the account of Ella Musk, a Genshin NPC known for speaking with Hilichurls. Most of the rewards were related to Elon Musk, who inspired Ella’s name, instead of anything related to the actual game.
The challenge caused discourse throughout the Genshin community, which was still fuming after a botched situation with the game’s anniversary rewards. To add insult to injury, the so-called community challenge didn’t offer any in-game rewards. Instead, the challenge rewards were all built around developer Mihoyo interacting with Elon Musk.
The now-deleted tweet listed these rewards for follower milestones:
- If Ella Musk’s account hit 500,000 followers, Genshin Impact would change its name back to PAIMON, the way it used to be.
- If Ella Musk’s account hit 1 million followers, Ella Musk would follow Elon Musk on Twitter.
- At 3 million followers, Genshin Impact would invite Elon Musk to stream the game.
- At 5 million followers, Mihoyo’s CEO would invite Elon Musk to come to their headquarters.
Fans weren’t thrilled at the thought of following a new account to help Mihoyo for these rewards that didn’t really matter to them.
Some thought that maybe the challenge was a joke, considering the unrealistic milestones for the account. Genshin Impact has 2.4 million followers, so it’d be unlikely for Ella’s account to match that let alone surpass it. Ella Musk currently has about 60,000 followers. It’s unclear if Mihoyo was simply being tongue in cheek here, especially considering that the company deleted the tweet outright after the backlash.
Elon Musk did respond to the initial tweet, though he didn’t seem to know about the challenge before it started. “Can’t wait to be in Genshin Impact,” he tweeted with a laughing emoji.
Ella Musk even responded, “When are you coming home, dad?” However, this tweet was deleted too.
There wasn’t any explanation about why Mihoyo deleted the tweets, but the highly negative reception seems to have been a factor. It looks like the Ella account is still there, but it’s unclear what Mihoyo plans to do with it now.
