Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta*, has seemingly accepted Twitter chief Elon Musk's challenge to a cage fight, according to Zuckerberg's social media.
After Elon Musk recently tweeted that he would be “up for a cage fight” with Zuckerberg, the Meta CEO shot back by posting a screenshot of Musk’s tweet with the caption “send me location.”
I’ve confirmed that Zuckerberg’s post on his Instagram account is, in fact, not a joke, which means the ball is now in Musk’s court. “The story speaks for itself,” Meta spokesperson Iska Saric told me.
Earlier in the day, Musk posted on Twitter, saying: "I'm up for a cage match if he (Zuckerberg) is lol."
I’m up for a cage match if he is lol
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 21, 2023
Zuckerberg posted a screenshot of the tweet on social media, saying: "Send me location" - the response which echoes the famous line uttered by former Russian UFC champion Khabib Nurmagomedov.
Alex Heath, an editor at The Verge, tweeted that a Meta spokesperson confirmed Zuckerberg was serious about fighting Musk. "The story speaks for itself," a spokesperson said, referring to Zuckerberg's post.
Musk replied to Heath's tweet, saying: "Vegas Octagon," in reference to the UFC Octagon in Las Vegas, thus naming the location for the fight.
"I have this great move that I call 'The Walrus,' where I just lie on top of my opponent & do nothing," Musk added on social media.
The feud comes following reports that Meta plans to launch a rival platform to Twitter, dubbed Threads.
The backstory here: since I recently reported more details about Meta’s forthcoming Twitter competitor, Musk has been taunting Zuckerberg on Twitter with zingers like “Zuck my 👅.” During an internal all-hands meeting at Meta last week, chief product officer Chris Cox told employees the company thinks creators want a version of Twitter that is “sanely run,” drawing cheers. “I’ve always thought that Twitter should have a billion people using it,” Zuckerberg said during a recent podcast interview with Lex Fridman.
In terms of tech billionaire CEOs literally fighting, Musk versus Zuckerberg would be as good as it gets. Musk, 51, has the upper hand on Zuckerberg in terms of sheer physical size, and he has talked about being in “real hard-core street fights” when he was growing up in South Africa. Meanwhile, Zuckerberg, 39, is an aspirational MMA fighter who is already winning Jiu-Jitsu tournaments. He also claims to have recently completed the grueling “Murph Challenge” workout in just under 40 minutes.
Regardless of who would win, I think we can all agree that a Musk-versus-Zuckerberg match would be one of the most entertaining fights of all time. It needs to happen. Don’t back down now, Musk.
It all seemed like a joke until Zuckerberg posted a screenshot of Musk’s tweet to Instagram with the words, “send me location.” A Twitter user then shared their own screenshot of Zuckerberg’s Instagram on Twitter on Wednesday night, to which Musk replied, “If this is for real, I will do it.”
I’ve reached out to Meta, the parent company of Facebook, to ask about how serious Zuckerberg might be about a real fight and have yet to get a reply. But the tech news outlet The Verge did get a response from Meta on Wednesday night: “The story speaks for itself.”
Musk replied to a tweet by a reporter from The Verge indicating that he’d like to fight Zuckerberg in a “[Las] Vegas Octagon.”
Musk went on to say, “I have this great move that I call ‘The Walrus’, where I just lie on top of my opponent & do nothing,” which seems to make the entire situation a joke. But his earlier tweets seemed pretty sincere.
Vegas Octagon
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 22, 2023
Musk also tweeted, “The most entertaining outcome is the most likely,” something that he likes to say in interviews.
Are two billionaires actually going to fight? And what kind of training will the 51-year-old Musk require since the 39-year-old Zuckerberg has already been training very publicly? No one knows for sure. But things could get really interesting (and really weird) if this actually happens.
Needless to say, plenty of people are already creating memes.
Mark Zuckerberg just accepted Elon’s invite for a cage match.
— Wall Street Silver (@WallStreetSilv) June 22, 2023
Choose your fighter.
Elon at 6’2” vs Zuck at 5’8”
🔥🔥🔥 pic.twitter.com/J9TFHsRbqt
This is, after all, a fight that started over competing social media networks. May the best nerd win.
While we can only assume Musk's cage fight proposition is a joke, Musk and Zuckerberg have in the past traded words over their respective tech kingdoms.
In 2016, Zuckerberg said he was "deeply disappointed" in SpaceX after one of the company's rockets destroyed a Facebook satellite.
In February 2020, Musk asked people to delete Facebook because it's "lame." And in May, Musk escalated the long-running disagreement again, saying he thinks Zuckerberg seems "extremely partisan" and that WhatsApp "cannot be trusted."
For his part, Zuckerberg has had the occasional kind word for Musk. In June, he lauded Musk for making Twitter "leaner" amid Zuckerberg's own drive to flatten Meta's management structure.
In the very, very slim chance that Musk and Zuckerberg were to meet in the cage, Musk would find a tough opponent in his tech world nemesis: Zuckerberg has been looking totally shredded lately. Zuckerberg said in May that he won two medals at a jiu-jitsu tournament in Redwood City, California. The Meta CEO has been training for over a year — in August, he said that he surfed and did a lot of martial arts during the pandemic.
Zuckerberg isn't the first person Musk has challenged to a fight.
In March 2022, Musk challenged Russian leader Vladimir Putin to "single combat" over Ukraine. Musk offered to let Putin "bring his bear" to the fight, suggesting that he would use a Boring Company flamethrower as his own weapon of choice.
Musk's challenge to the Russian president was summarily mocked at the time by Putin loyalist and Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov and Russian space chief Dmitry Rogozin.
Representatives for Zuckerberg at Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Insider sent outside regular business hours.
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