It’s happened to all of us. You’re playing your favorite game. You’re losing pretty badly. You blame the developers, or cheaters, or the internet. But not all of us have blamed the billionaire who owns our internet service provider, challenged him to a fight, and watched stunned, months later, as he actually showed up.
France is different like that. On November 15, an X user who goes by JimmyBLLT and has a picture of Everton midfielder Iliman Ndiaye as their profile avatar got heated while playing Call of Duty earlier this year (via Dexerto). “Xavier Niel je te déteste je te propose un 1v1 devant le Lidl de la rue Sainte à Marseille,” he tweeted back in May, which roughly translates to, “Xavier Niel I hate you, I propose a 1v1 in front of the Lidl on rue Sainte in Marseille.”
That would have been that, just another lizard brain moment evaporating into the endless ether of the internet, except that Xavier Niel caught wind of the insult and decided to visit said Lidl—an Aldi-like discount supermarket—just blocks away from the Old Port of Marseille. The telecommunications tycoon is a majority shareholder in one of France’s largest internet providers, Iliad SA. He’s worth and estimated $10 billion and he was apparently biding his time.
Last week on November 15, six months after JimmyBLLT sent their original tweet, Niel appeared at the Lidl on rue Sainte in Marseille. “I’m waiting for you,” he wrote in a quote-tweet of the original post. JimmyBLLT apologized but it was too late. Words have consequences, even on X. “Where are you? Come on! Do you want to meet in the car park?” Niel responded in a brief video according to a translation by Dexerto.
But JimmyBLLT chickened out. He explained that his original tweet was prompted by losing his temper to really bad lag in a Call of Duty match. Even so, he declined to meet the billionaire and give him justice due to a stomach bug and headache. “Sorry I give up,” he wrote. French billionaire one, heated gamers 0.