Last week – in the ever-growing sector of the news cycle called “Did I dream it?” – Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter, suggested to the Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg that they settle their, essentially trifling, differences in a cage fight. Zuckerberg, rather than saying, “Elon, that’s insane, you’re 51 years old and the richest person in human history, and I’m not far behind”, ostensibly replied: “Sure. Where and when?”
For those of us old enough to remember, the circus rivalled the one that accompanied the 2002, celebrity-adjacent, boxing-adjacent contest between Ricky Gervais and Grant Bovey. Dana White, the bombastic president of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, revealing a surprising ignorance of the historic beef between the animal-loving comedian and Anthea Turner’s wrong ’un ex-husband, predicted the Musk-Zuckerberg clash would break all records. “This would be the biggest fight ever in the history of the world,” he cooed.
Fighting used to be regarded as a way out of poverty. Manny Pacquiao, an all-time boxing great, grew up in extreme destitution in the Philippines (last year, he ran to be president). So, how to explain why two men with a combined wealth of $340bn would choose to step into the Octagon in Las Vegas and bash seven shades out of each other?
The UFC’s White talked of the “hundreds of millions of dollars” they would raise for charity, but no one was buying that. If Musk and Zuckerberg were really interested in philanthropy, they could drop billions without getting a black eye and a busted ego.
More persuasive is the theory that the fight was an extreme case of a pair of tech bros going rogue. In many ways, this made sense. Both Musk and Zuckerberg have amassed unimaginable riches and both have, presumably, had to stare down the question of what a meaningful life entails. For Zuckerberg, this led to a year of eating wild boars that he killed with a bow and arrow. Latterly, he has become obsessed with Brazilian jiu-jitsu, winning a couple of medals at a competition in California. He’s not alone among high-profile men in testing himself this way: the actor Tom Hardy made a surprise appearance in a Brazilian jiu-jitsu tournament in Milton Keynes last year, winning all his bouts.
But there’s also a simpler explanation for what’s happened: Musk was clearly joking and whoosh, it flew straight over Zuckerberg’s head. You might expect the men who between them control Twitter, Instagram and Facebook to know better, but social media is an atrocious place to have any kind of discussion, which is why it so often descends into a bin fire. Sarcasm is the first casualty of digital conversations: Musk even put a “lol” at the end of his initial response to the idea of a cage fight.
The Musk-Zuckerberg spat mainly shows how far social media has fallen from its original ideals. In 2010, Zuckerberg was named Time’s Person of the Year and praised for his efforts to “tame the howling mob and turn the lonely, antisocial world of random chance into a friendly world”.
Alternatively, you can just settle your disagreements with a fight in a cage.
• Tim Lewis is an Observer columnist
