Two of the world’s richest men — who might find a better use for their time running their multiple Fortune 500 companies — have publicly agreed to fight each other in a proposed “cage match.”
Our eager competitors are Twitter owner and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, 51, and Meta CEO and recent jiu-jitsu enthusiast Mark Zuckerberg, 39. There’s nowhere else this story could have emerged but on social media, the bread and butter of these two men.
Musk tweeted last Tuesday night that he’d be “up for a cage match,” with Zuckerberg.
Perhaps not wanting to meet Musk on the Twitter home field, Zuckerberg hit back on Meta-owned Instagram. “Send Me Location,” he wrote, overlaid on a screenshot of Musk’s challenge in an Instagram story.
Musk also refused to leave familiar waters and tweeted “Vegas Octagon,” where the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) hosts matches, in response to a news story about the pair.
“I have this great move that I call ‘The Walrus,’ where I just lie on top of my opponent & do nothing,” he added in a follow-up tweet.
It remains to be seen if the two men are actually serious about fighting each other. A spokesperson for Meta has said that the “story speaks for itself.”
In the meantime, Musk has admitted: “I almost never work out, except for picking up my kids & throwing them in the air.”
Though Musk is apparently much taller than Zuckerberg — reportedly standing at about six feet one inch to Zuckerberg’s five feet seven inches — the Meta CEO is 12 years younger and recently won a gold and silver medal at his first jiu-jitsu competition.
Sports journalist Nick Peet told the BBC that Zuckerberg has only been training in the Brazilian martial arts style for about 18 months, but his money is still on Zuckerberg to win if the fight ever materializes.
Musk has been offered training help from none other than Andrew Tate, infamous social media personality and former kickboxer. Though Tate might want to first focus on fighting his own legal battles — he and his brother were charged with rape, human trafficking and forming a criminal gang to exploit women in Romania earlier this week.
OK, but why do they even want to fight to begin with?
The social media giants both men helm are in direct competition with each other, so I guess why not make the rivalry physical, as well, right?
Competition between Meta and Twitter has been heating up since product photos leaked of Meta’s forthcoming Twitter competitor, an app rumoured to be called “Threads” and internally called “Project 92.”
Meta’s chief product officer Chris Cox called the app “our response to Twitter,” and told employees that they’ve “been hearing from creators and public figures who are interested in having a platform that is sanely run,” seemingly throwing shade at Musk’s handling of the Twitter takeover.
The Verge journalist Alex Heath adds that Musk has recently been “taunting Zuckerberg on Twitter with zingers,” since the news about Threads dropped, and Zuckerberg hasn’t been shy about ribbing him back.
“I’ve always thought that Twitter should have a billion people using it,” the Meta CEO said in a podcast episode with Lex Fridman.
While the idea of two white-collar workers duking it out for our entertainment is alluring, Musk has a history of making promises he never follows up on.
Most famously, the Tesla CEO was forced to step down as chair after he tweeted that he was going to take the electric car manufacturer private, running afoul of U.S. regulators.
In November 2022, Musk said he intended to step down as Twitter CEO after his controversial takeover of the social media platform. He only made good on the promise after running a poll on Twitter asking users if he should vacate the top job.
Perhaps we’ll see them in the ring? Only time will tell.
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