Mainly clear. Low 62F. Winds SSE at 5 to 10 mph..
Mainly clear. Low 62F. Winds SSE at 5 to 10 mph.
Updated: June 30, 2023 @ 5:35 pm
Mark Zuckerberg facebook official account. Mark Zuckerberg is a CEO of Meta and Facebook

Mark Zuckerberg facebook official account. Mark Zuckerberg is a CEO of Meta and Facebook
Billionaires are having a rough month. First, we have the Titan submersible sinking on its underwater Titanic tour with five billionaires onboard the ship. A tragedy, yet also a rather ironic one, with Twitter ablaze with jokes. If the rich were once an aspiration in America, they have deep dived (pun intended) into pure farce. In 2022 the film Triangle of Sadness, nominated for Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Original Screenplay, played up the idea of the super-rich dying in a storm on a yacht. Less than a year later life reflects art. At the heart of all this animosity and ridicule is that the super wealthy have become cartoon characters of themselves — whether it’s the buffoonery of Donald Trump’s recent nonstop tours of courthouses, the racist rants of former Phoenix Suns owner Robert Sarver, or just the awful behavior of social media titans.
Which leads to the next step in social class evolutionary embarrassment: the proposed MMA cage fight between Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter owner Elon Musk. In a world not lacking outlandish headlines, here we have the mother of them all, where instead of the rich eating the poor, they’re finally cannibalizing themselves.
Back in 1999, David Fincher made a now cult classic Fight Club, starring Brad Pitt and Edward Norton as the alpha and beta males who create an underground fight club to reclaim their masculinity. If this took place today, Pitt’s Tyler Durden would be an Andrew Tate folk hero to the incel community. The film argued that men were bored with their feminized consumerism lifestyle and craved to return to primal urges, leading to a wild third act of government rebellion and domestic terrorism. Watching Zuckerberg and Musk go back and forth on social media mocking each other, one gets the idea that these two kings of tech are now just bored. After conquering the media, they must position their alpha status after decades of being the man behind the curtain, shaping the tech and Internet world we have in front of us.
“This would be the biggest fight ever in the history of the world, bigger than anything that’s ever been done,” United Fighting Championship CEO Dana White said. “It would break all pay-per-view records.”
CNBC reports, “The tech executives have a history of bad blood, with the fight challenge coming after reports emerged that Zuckerberg’s Meta is working on building a rival to Twitter. While a standard UFC pay-per-view costs $80, White said he would charge $100 for the Musk-Zuckerberg bout.” (“Musk-Zuckerberg ‘cage match’ PPV would coast $100, bring in over $1 billion,” Nicolas Vega, June 23, 2023.)
For most of human history the rich pitted the poor against each other to fight for their entertainment. The colosseums were filled with poverty-stricken criminals or Christians, while the rich sat and watched in pleasure. But this is different, almost narcissistically ill. Two middle-aged men with all the money in the world, literally, are going to charge the poor to watch them fight each other. Let’s say with ticket sales, pay-per-view sales, plus merchandise and other streams of revenue, they make a billion, who gets that money? The UFC and the billionaires. Oh, sure, I’m sure some charities will benefit, but it still benefits the rich come tax time. And to see what? Two out-of-shape pathetic crybabies fight an underwhelming minute or a sad, drawn out few rounds. What’s next? Mark Cuban versus Jeff Bezos? Hillary Clinton versus Ann Coulter? Joel Osteen versus Sam Harris? The irony is that the men who built our modern Western Civilization are now the same men willing to crush it.
If the Titan sub story was award-winning satire come to life, then this is an episode of Robot Chicken’s claymation Celebrity Death Match. A South Park episode unrealized until now. A farce that will make more money in a few hours than anything else one could dream of.
I’ve currently been going through that mid-life existential process I kept seeing in 1990s movies like American Beauty, Fight Club and Being John Malkovich. Asking, what is the point? Well, I don’t think capitalism will save us, but neither will watching the most powerful men in the world fight each other in a limp battle of the chumps.
The current state of manhood is not healthy. But maybe the only silver lining of watching doomed underwater excursions and celebrity death matches is the realization that no one is content. Maybe we are all seeking adventure and purpose. Maybe it’s time to burn Rome and play the fiddle. So, who wants to join my bluegrass band?
Never miss an issue. Sign up for free today.
Your browser is out of date and potentially vulnerable to security risks.
We recommend switching to one of the following browsers:

source