On Saturday, Twitter chairman Elon Musk stated that he would begin to train if the mixed martial arts cage fight that he provoked with fellow tech billionaire and media mogul Mark Zuckerberg, takes shape.
Image Source: Yahoo News
On Tuesday, the owner of Twitter tweeted that he was ready for a cage match in Las Vegas with Mr Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook parent Meta, who has trained in jiu-jitsu.
In a talk on Twitter with Mr Ashlee Vance, the author of a book on Mr Musk and the space race, Mr Musk said, “I haven’t started training yet. So if this does happen, I will.”
While attending a birthday party in Europe, Mr Musk said that the match “might actually happen”, adding that it was possible it could go badly if Mr Zuckerberg takes the match seriously.
Mr Musk also said SpaceX investments in the rocket Starship, the first flight of which exploded over the Gulf of Mexico in April, raising concerns about its environmental effects, may reach US$3 billion (S$4.06 billion) in 2023.
He also said his rocket company was working on betterment of Starship.
Months after Musk acquired Twitter, Mr Zuckerberg’s Meta revealed it was looking to launch its own text-based social media platform – a direct rival to Musk’s Twitter.
Ever since, Musk has trolled Mr Zuckerberg with messages on Twitter, telling his fans this week: “I’m up for a cage match if he is lol.”
“Please god let this happen,” technology journalist Taylor Lorenz wrote on Twitter.
Podcaster Bennett Tomlin said, “The best Musk-Zuckerberg cage match is one in which two men enter and no men leave.”
The two tech titans have been at loggerheads with each other for years with conflicting opinions on everything from politics to artificial intelligence.
But their new business spat has newly sparked the animosity.
Elon Musk retaliated rudely to a latest claim by a Meta official that there was appetite for a “sanely run” Twitter alternative.
The Tesla and SpaceX boss took over the social media platform for US$44 billion (S$59 billion) before sacking much of its staff and allowing banned right-wing conspiracy theorists back onto the platform – sending advertisers fleeing.
In the previous week, Elon Musk talked about his handling of Twitter at an event in Paris , saying advertisers had come returned and he had removed almost all bots.
Earlier in June, in an interview with US podcaster Lex Fridman, Mr Zuckerberg was asked to say something good about Elon Musk’s handling of Twitter.
After an eight-second pause for thought, he said Mr Musk had “led a push early on to make Twitter a lot leaner”, a move he said would help the industry.
In an interview with TMZ Live, UFC President Dana White said that he had a conversation with both Zuckerberg and Musk on the phone about the fight context and insisted that both are “dead serious” about fighting each other in UFC Octagon. The UFC president is of the opinion that Musk vs Zuckerberg could become the biggest fight in history. “Talked with Mark and Elon last night, both guys are absolutely dead serious about this,” White said.
“This would be the biggest fight ever in the history of the world — bigger than anything that’s ever been done, it would break all pay per view records. These guys would raise hundreds of millions of dollars for charity,” White said.
