Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney openly criticizes Microsoft under the company’s Copilot ad, sarcastically asking the AI to make his taskbar vertical and to never ask him to create a Windows account again. Within hours, Elon Musk shows his support.

Tim Sweeney, who is no stranger to questioning companies worth trillions of dollars, took a jab at Microsoft for removing the ability to reposition the taskbar, which is something that irks many users. The Fortnite creator also despises the fact that Microsoft removed the ability to sign in with a local account and pushes everyone to log in with a Microsoft Account (MSA).

Four and a half hours later, Elon Musk, the poster child of criticism, jumped in to reply to Tim Sweeney’s comment, saying, “Especially the Windows account part”.

One and a half hours later, Elon replies again to Tim’s original post, with a Fire and a Face with tears of joy emoji, leading us to believe that he probably thought of it again and had a laugh.

However, Microsoft’s blatant promotion of Copilot ads is no laughing matter, and the users aren’t silent either.

Microsoft’s Copilot ads are hated by the public

Microsoft has been churning out “Hey Copilot” based social media video campaigns with famous influencers and YouTubers, and the majority of the comments under these posts are hostile responses, to say the least.

A recent collaboration involves tech YouTuber ijustine, who ironically is a vocal Apple enthusiast. The video showcases Justine telling the audience that they can wake up their computers with “Hey Copilot” by activating it in the Windows Settings, and that they can ask Copilot “anything”, which makes Tim Sweeney’s response all the more hilarious.

It’s understandable why Microsoft is in a sudden rush to promote Copilot, especially as competitors like Gemini and even ChatGPT are gaining more monthly active users.

However, none of the Copilot ads flooding the Windows social media pages is doing any good for Microsoft. In fact, users are mostly hostile and hateful, with some of them citing genuine issues like this:

“Hey Copilot, stop putting your trash “news” pop ups on my child’s laptop.”

To make matters worse, a recent Copilot ad with another YouTuber shows a clear mistake in Copilot’s part, where the AI suggested a wrong recommendation, but the user was forced to make the right decision on his own, showing Copilot’s ineffectiveness.

People want to reposition their Taskbar, like in Windows 10

Windows 10 might’ve had to deal with a ton of hate when it was launched, but within a few years, the now-retired OS has built a massive fan following, and most of it has to be Windows 11’s doing.

Customization was something that Windows users raved about when compared to the likes of Apple, and the ability to make the Taskbar vertical, or on the top, was something people were not willing to sacrifice when they were asked to switch to Windows 11.

To be honest, I haven’t changed my taskbar’s position when I was using Windows 10. I tried it once and reverted. But now, solely for this article, I changed the taskbar to the vertical position on the right side in my Windows 10 VM, and it feels like a breath of fresh air.

Earlier in 2022, the then head of product told reporters why Microsoft removed the ability to move the taskbar, and the reason put forward at that time was that it takes a lot of work, and that there weren’t enough users asking for it.

Microsoft’s own data suggested that the users who want new features in the taskbar is much higher than the users who prefer to keep the taskbar to the left or to the right.

Now that Microsoft has added a whole set of features to the taskbar, like a new Start menu, colorful battery icons, and the upcoming Ask Copilot, which aims to replace Windows Search, it is unlikely that the company will add the code to bring back the taskbar repositioning ability.

That is, unless Copilot gets so much better that it can code the functionality right into Windows 11, especially since 30% of the code at Microsoft is now AI-generated, and it is something that Tim Sweeney mockingly asked Copilot to do.

Now that users, including billionaire CEOs, are openly asking to bring back this feature, it might be something on Microsoft’s to-do list, but we are not keeping our hopes an inch above the ground, especially since the company’s focus is to make Windows an agentic OS with the taskbar as a dynamic hub for AI.

All things considered, there are ways to manually reposition the taskbar in Windows 11, and Tim Sweeney also mentions it in his reply under the X post.

Windows 11 demands that you sign in with a Microsoft account

Microsoft has been tightening the screws on local accounts for years, starting with Windows 10, when the company began slowly nudging users to choose a Microsoft Account during setup.

When Windows 11 launched in 2021, the Home version required an internet connection and an MSA right in the Out of Box Experience (OOBE). Windows 11 Pro, however, allowed local accounts, but only if you set up the device for work or school.

That being said, Microsoft still “allowed” a back door for at least power users to skip the MSA setup during OOBE. The easiest method to bypass the MSA requirement was to run oobebypassnro in the Command Prompt during setup. There were also commands like start ms-cxh:localonly or start ms-cxh://setaddlocalonly that did the same thing.

But as of October 2025, Microsoft permanently shut these doors as well. The company removed all known local account bypasses in Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26120.6772 and 26220.6772.

Windows Latest tested these builds for both Windows 11 Home and Pro, and sure enough, all three commands did nothing or rebooted back to the same Microsoft account error page.

To make matters worse, you can’t install Windows 11 without an internet connection, and at this point, Microsoft is playing with our patience.

Elon Musk’s comment supporting Tim Sweeney, with “Especially the Windows account part”, is understandable and makes us question how Microsoft will convince their users to continue using Windows 11 if given the opportunity to switch to competing platforms like Linux or macOS, which, by the way, requires you to have an Apple account.

But Apple can get away with such stuff because of their desirability factor. Something that Microsoft has never mastered.

I’m sure that developers and executives at Microsoft have their reasons to continue doing things to Windows that even their loyal fans hate. But at one point, the company should realise that no matter how many Copilot ads they make, people will not use the Microsoft-made AI unless they are happy with Windows.

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