Yes, the “billionaire brawl” is the ultimate Twitter and Instagram meme but what should be a joke is being taken seriously. I’ll spare you all the back and forth but the upshot is that after Zuckerberg’s Meta, formerly known as Facebook, revealed plans to launch a Twitter competitor, the 51-year-old Musk posted that he’s “up for a cage match” if 39-year-old Zuckerberg is. Zuckerberg responded, “Send me location.”
Vox has the best ‘splainer I’ve seen:
There’s a question as to whether this match is even going to happen, despite the back-and-forth social media banter between Musk and Zuckerberg, and Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) president Dana White’s assertion that “both guys are absolutely dead serious.” It would be a big spectacle of an MMA fight, but to an extent, Zuckerberg and Musk have already gotten the benefit of publicity by just talking about fighting.
This shared plea for attention could be a means of distracting from news they might want to bury: Just before the cage fight news broke, Meta announced that it would cut off access to news on Facebook and Instagram in Canada following the passage of a law that requires such tech companies to compensate domestic media outlets when linking to their content. Meanwhile, Musk’s reputation has plunged in the last year — data from Morning Consult from late 2022 indicated that his net favorability had fallen by 13 points among US adults, and even Tesla’s reputation has been dinged by his behavior.
But entertaining a fight like this also just seems to be a reflection of Musk’s and Zuckerberg’s sheer vanity.
Meanwhile, proud misogynist and accused rapist and sex trafficker Andrew Tate has offered to train Musk. Zuckerberg has won Brazilian jiu-jitsu competitions. The 187-pound Musk says his “great move” is to just “lie on top of my opponent and do nothing.”
Color me extremely skeptical this fight will ever actually happen. But UFC president White said he plans to charge $100, up from the standard $80, to those who want to watch.
Sorry, but you’d have to pay me more than that to watch.
