At almost any other time in history, the prospect of two of the richest men in the world knocking 10 bells out of each other in the name of hype and ego might feel unusual. However, we’re living in a Floyd Mayweather Jr. vs. Logan Paul era, an undisputed World Champ vs. a YouTube star era. I think we can dispense with the vagaries of what’s normal and what’s not. Let’s be honest, the only real surprise about the on/off cage fight between Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg is that neither has suggested that they do it on Mars yet.
In the meantime, the Tesla CEO and Meta founder are still at the flirting stage. When one’s interested, the other takes the moral high ground. When one starts to get serious, the other can only muster sarcastic digs. Seriously, guys, get an Octagon already!
Musk still claims to be serious about it. Although in typical frat bro style, you can never really be too sure what’s going on. However, as of yesterday he was heading to Zuck’s house: “For the Tesla FSD test drive in Palo Alto tonight, I will ask the car to drive to @finkd’s house. Will also test latest X livestream video, so you can monitor our adventure in real-time! If we get lucky and Zuck my [sic] actually answers the door, the fight is on!”
That classic piece of Musk bravado came in response to Zuckerberg dismissing his fighting intentions out of hand, taking to Threads to allegedly call off the fight. “I think we can all agree Elon isn’t serious and it’s time to move on. I offered a real date. Dana White offered to make this a legit competition for charity. Elon won’t confirm a date, then says he needs surgery, and now asks to do a practice round in my backyard instead. If Elon ever gets serious about a real date and official event, he knows how to reach me. Otherwise, time to move on. I’m going to focus on competing with people who take the sport seriously.”
Where we go from here is anyone’s guess. Is the fight going to happen? Very probably not. Should the fight happen? Well, we’d be lying if we said we wouldn’t head to X or Threads—where it would allegedly be streamed live from the chosen venue of Rome—to tune in, along with the rest of the world.
Whether this is all this is a good thing for humanity of course, is another question altogether (it’s definitely not). Our hope is that they eventually decide not to fight, but rather move in together, making the world a better place one new, fairly similar, social media platform at a time. We can but dream.
Main image: Happy Punch Promo