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This is bog standard rich dude stuff in many traditional rich guy meatspace sports. Amateur to semipro SCCA motorsports is full of rich guys who are mediocre drivers and spend a ton of money to try to get the car to carry them to wins. Hell, the entire sport of Polo allows the Patron to take one roster spot and the handicap system is designed to make it competitively practical to field him, resulting in last year's US Open where a team owner in his late 50s suffered an accident that left him in a coma. Rich guys hire hunting and fishing guides who line things up for them to take trophies, they get the best gear to help them compete, anything for an edge to claim glory.
We only find this shocking because we're not used to people using videogames as a status flex.
Devil's advocate: people being able to buy the best gear also advances the sport. Competitive shooting does this all the time in its Open divisions, where you can run basically anything you want; if you've discovered a kind of setup that gives you a leg up over the other shooters then it's perfectly valid to use it (and if it came out of your garage you'll probably have people wanting to commercialize it).
Of course, not all divisions are Open (so if you don't have 5000 dollars to spend on the best gear, you can still be competitive with everyone else), and you still need to actually make the shots so if you're bad you'll get beaten by people in lower divisions much less your own... but having a division where you can just push the envelope however you like advances the sport.
I agree!
Spending money on the sport also supports events, a lot of pros in minor sports support themselves coaching or training amateurs.
I'm just saying that buying the appearance of competitive talent is a super-normal thing that rich guys do all the time.
Even things like travel, highbrow art consumption, wine collecting, often resemble trying to spend a lot of money to appear interesting.
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I mean, we don't expect the hunter to build his own rifle or a racer to build his own car. But we do expect them to know what their gear is doing.
In racing there are amateur series designed around home-mechanics, with price limits and rules against outside work. 24 Hours of Lemons, junk car races. The idea is you limit the purchase price of the car and forbid anyone outside the team's drivers from working on it. The archetype being four buddies taking turns driving in the endurance race, after fixing up a $500 Ford Taurus on weekends in their garage.
And notoriously you run into teams of four that are three professional mechanics and one investment banker, with the mechanics being paid "friends" of their patron, the car too nice to ever realistically find at the price point they claim, and the patron isn't a great driver but with a better machine he gets the anchor spot on the team and pulls across the finish line in first place excited for his trophy.
Of course the reverse attitude can morph into universal envy and ego protection. Physical culture is a hobby of mine, hardly one in which I've achieved much, but even I've experienced the twin levels of bullshit here: people richer than me comment that they can't work out because they are just so busy with work, people poorer than me say it must be nice to be able to afford all that equipment etc. And both have some point to them, but I'm sure if I dug into my interlocutor's lifestyle I could dispute it.
Interesting thing about physical culture. Arnold said that there are no shortcuts. You can only get an impressive body by working for it. But arnold was full of it. You can buy steroids and speedrun to the finish line pretty much. I doubt that Jeff Bezos knows much about lifting yet he looks more jacked than you or me.
"'roids are not for the lazy" is how it's been put to me by... guys who do a lot of 'roids.
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Speak for yourself.
But for that matter, I think the impact of steroids is often overstated. Bezos undoubtedly had to go into the gym to build that muscle. Was it easier than it would have been without steroids? Sure. But he did put in work to get a body like that. Probably more work than half the people bitching about his steroid use have put in.
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