Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg say they are ready for a cage fight
London
CNN
—
Business rivalry is apparently not enough for two of the tech industry’s most powerful billionaires. Now Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg say they want to settle the score in a cage match.
Twitter owner and Tesla ( TSLA ) CEO Musk recently tweeted that he would be “up for a cage fight” with Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta. In an Instagram story on Wednesday, Zuckerberg hit back by posting a screenshot of Musk’s tweet with the caption: “Send me location.”
Musk then answered to a tweet about the fight by Alex Heath, editor of tech news website The Verge, with “Vegas Octagon” — a reference to the Las Vegas arena that hosts the Ultimate Fighting Championship.
“I have this great move that I call ‘The Walrus’ where I just lie on top of my opponent and do nothing,” he added in a separate tweet.
CNN has reached out to Meta for comment. A spokesperson for the company told the Verge: “The [Instagram] history speaks for itself.”
It is still unclear whether Zuckerberg and Musk are serious or laughing.
However, who would win in a cage match remains to be seen. Musk is physically bigger than Zuckerberg, but the Meta boss trains jiu-jitsu, the Brazilian martial art, and won gold and silver in a tournament in May.
Oddspedia, a sports betting platform, compiled odds from several different bookmakers, including Bovada, Bet Online and Ladbrokes, and concluded that Zuckerberg has an 83% chance of winning the match.
Meanwhile, bookmaker Paddy Power is betting the fight never happens, but that if it does, both men have an equal chance of winning.
“If this fight actually goes ahead, with any luck, they will both knock some sense into each other,” a spokesperson for the Irish company said in a statement.
The two – who previously jockeyed for a high spot on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index before Musk became the world’s richest man – have clashed in the past.
In 2017, they engaged in a very public feud over the future of artificial intelligence.
Musk had repeatedly warned about the dangers of AI, describing it as a potentially existential threat to humanity. Zuckerberg, for his part, had a much more optimistic view.
During a Facebook Live broadcast at the time, he dismissed “nay-sayers” who outlined “doomsday scenarios” as “quite irresponsible”.
Musk fired back shortly after, tweeting: “I have spoken to Mark about this. His understanding of the subject is quite limited.”
Musk knocked Zuckerberg from number three on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index in 2020, before becoming the richest person in the world soon after.
He was briefly ousted from the top spot in December by Bernard Arnault, the chairman of French luxury goods giant LVMH (LVMHF), before reclaiming the title in May. Zuckerberg is now in 10th place.
