A few months ago, I played one of these games with three friends over dinner. We passed a phone around, and each took a turn buying whatever they wanted from the catalog: no rules, no strategy, just spend freely. What I noticed afterward was how different our choices were and how quickly those differences became a window into things we had never directly talked about. One friend went straight for the philanthropic items: hospitals, schools, and climate funds. Another built an entertainment empire: stadiums, film studios, and a music label. The third bought private islands and superyachts and seemed entirely unapologetic about it. I kept gravitating toward space-related purchases, which probably says something I am still working out. None of us had planned to reveal anything about ourselves. The game just created a situation where it happened anyway. If you want to understand why people keep coming back to spend Elon Musk’s fortune on games, that dinner is a decent place to start.
The Choices Are More Personal Than They Look
On the surface, buying things in a spending simulator feels inconsequential. None of it is real. Nothing you buy costs you anything. There are no stakes and no lasting consequences. But consequence-free decisions are not the same as meaningless ones, and what people choose when nothing is at risk turns out to be surprisingly revealing.
People who spend heavily on charitable items are telling you something. Not necessarily that they are generous; the connection between hypothetical generosity and real-world behavior is complicated, and researchers have written entire papers about it. But they are telling you how they like to see themselves, what story they want to be true about their values, and which version of wealth feels defensible to them. People who go straight for the luxury items are telling you something different, and the honesty of that choice, made without judgment and without real money changing hands, is often more direct than you would get if you simply asked them what they would do with a billion dollars.
The Game as a Values Mirror
There is a long tradition in psychology of using hypothetical scenarios to surface people’s genuine values. Would you push a trolley? How would you divide a windfall among family members? What would you do if you found a wallet? These thought experiments work because they remove the friction of real consequences while preserving the structure of a genuine choice. The spending simulator operates in the same space, with the added advantage that it is genuinely engaging rather than feeling like a test.
When you sit down to spend a fictional fortune, you make dozens of small decisions that add up to a portrait of your priorities. The order in which you choose items in matters. Whether you ever look at the charitable section matters. Whether you optimize for speed or for personal satisfaction matters. None of this is information you are consciously offering. It just emerges from playing. which is exactly why it tends to be more honest than a direct survey about values would produce.
“None of us planned to reveal anything about ourselves. The game just created a situation where it happened anyway. That is the quietest trick these games pull.”
What the Impulse to Optimize Tells You
Some players, within minutes of starting, shift from browsing to calculating. They stop thinking about what they want and start thinking about what is most efficient. They look for the highest-priced items, rank them, and build a spending path designed to reach zero as fast as possible. This optimization impulse is interesting because it reveals a particular relationship with open-ended problems: some people find freedom uncomfortable and immediately impose structure on it.
It also tends to correlate, loosely, with how people handle real-world financial decisions. The player who immediately optimizes their spending path is often the same person who has a detailed budget spreadsheet, researches purchases extensively before making them, and finds impulsive buying genuinely stressful. The player who just clicks whatever looks interesting and checks the balance periodically tends to have a more intuitive, less structured relationship with money. Neither approach is better, in the game or in life, but the patterns are recognizable, and recognizing them in a context this low-stakes is oddly illuminating.
The Embarrassing Purchases and What They Signal
Almost every player, at some point during an extended session, buys something they find slightly embarrassing to admit to. Not morally embarrassing; nothing in the catalog is designed to make you feel guilty. More like personally revealing in a way that catches you off guard. You buy a sports franchise for a team you have rooted for since childhood and feel, briefly, something that functions like genuine emotion about a completely fictional purchase. You spend billions on a private library and realize you care about that more than the yacht you bought three clicks earlier. You find yourself reluctant to spend on certain categories and curious about that reluctance.
These small moments of self-recognition are a byproduct of the game being genuinely open-ended. When you can buy anything, what you choose to buy and what you choose to avoid says something. Most games are designed to funnel players toward specific choices and reward them for it. This one genuinely does not care. The neutrality creates a space where authentic preferences can surface, and authentic preferences, even in a game about fictional billions, have a way of feeling true.
The Conversation About What Wealth Is Actually For
One of the more unexpected effects of playing these games in groups is that they reliably spark a conversation that most people find surprisingly hard to have in any other context: what is money actually for? Not in the abstract policy sense, but personally. What would you actually do with resources if they were not a constraint? What does your gut say before your rational brain has time to compose a more defensible answer?
Some people discover, to their surprise, that the honest answer is smaller than they expected. They run out of things they genuinely want well before they run out of money, and the remainder sits there, stubbornly large, demanding a purpose they had not previously thought through. Others discover the opposite: that their wants expand to fill whatever space is available and that the fantasy of unlimited resources is not quite as satisfying as they anticipated because the wanting is the point, not the having.
Why the Game Does Not Judge You for Your Answers
This is, I think, the most important design quality of the best versions of these games. They present options and they track your balance and they do nothing else. No score for choosing charitably over extravagantly. No penalty for going straight for the superyacht. No reward for the most ethically defensible spending path. The game refuses to tell you what the right answer is, and that refusal is what makes the experience feel safe enough to be honest in.
Moral frameworks attached to games tend to produce moral performance rather than genuine reflection. Players make the choices that make them look good, to themselves and to anyone watching, rather than the choices that feel true. Remove the judgment and you get something closer to an actual picture of what people value, which is considerably more interesting and considerably more useful than a performance would be.
What You Take With You When You Close the Tab
Most players leave these games with at least one thought they did not arrive with. Sometimes it is about the scale of wealth; sometimes it is about their own priorities; sometimes it is something less defined, a vague sense of having encountered a question worth sitting with. That residue, small as it is, is more than most entertainment produces.
The games that spend Elon’s money do not set out to be meaningful. They are built around a simple, funny, endlessly shareable premise. But meaning has a habit of showing up anyway in spaces that are honest enough to let it. A game that hands you unlimited resources and genuinely does not tell you what to do with them is, in its quiet way, one of the more honest experiences the internet currently offers. What you do inside that honesty is, of course, entirely up to you.