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In the heat of the moment, we have all posted things online that we later regretted. Just this past weekend, goaded into a couple tequila shots to celebrate Pride, I let a friend slather lipstick on me in some sort of bizarre barroom ritual and then posted the unsightly results. It happens.
Naturally, regrettable posting is what everyone assumed had happened a few days ago when Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg — two of the world’s richest men who have humongous companies to run — challenged each other to a cage match.
It all started when Musk posted on his newly acquired Twitter platform that he would be “up for a cage fight” with Zuckerberg, the chief of the Facebook and Instagram parent company Meta. Rather than ignoring the late-night taunt, Zuckerberg posted a screenshot of Musk’s tweet and captioned it “send me location.”
Not ready to back down, Musk replied to Zuckerberg’s post: “Vegas Octagon.” For those not familiar with mixed martial arts, the Octagon is the competition area used for matches put on by the Las Vegas-based sports company Ultimate Fighting Championship (aka UFC).
At first it didn’t seem like the two tech entrepreneurs, whose combined net worth exceeds the GDPs of nearly four-fifths of the world’s countries, were serious. Musk even joked that his signature move in such a fight would be attempting to flatten Zuckerberg by simply flopping on top of him like a walrus.
However, more recent events make it seem like this UFC match may actually happen.
According to UFC CEO Dana White, Zuckerberg was the first to reach out to the mixed martial arts league, asking if Musk “was serious.” White says that he relayed the question to Musk, who responded that he was “dead serious.”
White claims to have spent about 90 minutes on the phone with the billionaires so far. This would seem like a lot of time to put into a cage match discussion for two men who clearly have a lot of other things they could be doing if they weren’t somewhat committed. Although it can be difficult to tell when Musk is kidding, and he is known to take gags to extreme levels, a Meta representative has since confirmed that Zuckerberg at least is not joking about holding the bout.
Of course, everyone on the internet has been breaking the first rule of Billionaire Fight Club by talking incessantly about this hypothetical match. It is anyone’s guess as to who would really win in a physical fight, but that hasn’t stopped a lot of speculation. Zuckerberg, only 38 years old, has been training in Brazilian jiujitsu for several months, and has even competed in a few tournaments. At 51, Musk is no longer a young man, and he has admitted to “almost never” working out, though he also said he’d train if the match goes forward. Despite his age and his relative lack of martial arts experience, Musk has a huge size advantage over Zuckerberg, towering over the social media scion by about five inches and outweighing him by as much as 50 pounds.
While mixed martial arts viewers can see a typical UFC pay-per-view match for $80, White said his company would charge $100 for the Zuck-Musk throwdown. The billionaire fighters would reportedly be donating their cut, and White believes the fight “would raise hundreds of millions of dollars for charity.”
The inevitable question: Do we need a literal slugfest between two of the world’s richest men as the culmination of schoolyard taunts on social media? Why, yes, we do.
For one thing, the years-long festering antagonism between Musk and Zuckerberg has already expressed itself in less healthful ways. As much as it would be nice if our species had evolved beyond this point, I bet most adult men have at least one story from some point in life in which coming to blows has actually improved a relationship (whether with the other combatant, with oneself, or both). Plus, Musk and Zuckerberg could each use a little reputational rehab. Raising a nine-figure sum for charity while putting on a bit of a public spectacle might help.
Forget about the principals of this fight for a second though. Don’t the rest of us deserve to see Musk and Zuckerberg beat the hell out of each other? They’ve put society through a lot over the past few years. I, for one, say bring on the schadenfreude.
Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.
ATL Finance, Elon Musk, Finance, Mark Zuckerberg, UFC, World’s Richest Men
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