Are Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg going to have a cage fight? Of course they aren’t. In case you missed this story, Zuckerberg’s company, Meta, recently released plans for a Twitter-like app; Musk responded to tweets about it by saying that he was “up for a cage fight” with the Facebook founder; Zuck shot back with a meme that only Ultimate Fighting Championship fans will actually get; and the world continues to turn/get hotter. The only thing you really need to understand about this affair is that two men who shouldn’t have GSOH anywhere near their potential dating profile tried to make some funnies, and everyone else joined in the battle royale for attention. Did I mention that it’s really hot outside?
Anyway. On the surface, this story probably reflects better on Zuck than Musk: the former, after all, actually practises mixed martial arts (MMA), and recently competed in a Brazilian jiu-jitsu tournament where he won a brace of medals. As a two-decade BJJ bro with a handful of amateur MMA fights under my own (black) belt, I know how difficult that is. Even if you’re hiring the best coaches in the world, you still have to do the work to get better, and there is (I’m assuming) no level of wealth that makes it feel better when another man grinds his shoulder into your face.
Competing is even scarier. Though serious injuries in the sport are reasonably rare, you’re essentially daring random strangers to hyperextend your joints and squeeze your carotid arteries shut every time you have a match, and some of them are really, really good at it. That Zuckerberg is giving it a go, when he could probably just pay 100 bodyguards to follow him everywhere for the rest of his life, shows a humility and willingness to embrace the beginner mind that you have to admire, even if you’ve seen The Social Network. Besides, a billionaire paying some of the world’s best grapplers to turn him into a fighting machine is so comic-book that, as a nerd, I’m honour-bound to respect it. I hope he builds an anti-Superman suit next.
This, I think, is also why I’m a bit disappointed in Musk. His fans refer to him as a real-life Iron Man Tony Stark: a self-made, self-taught billionaire who’s an expert in everything from rocketry to neural enhancement. He is supposed to be the pinnacle of the productivity bro pyramid: a perfectly optimised guy who sleeps for six hours a night and spends his days nudging humanity towards its next evolutionary phase. Unfortunately, every time he tweets, he unpicks this image just a little bit: a meme when he could be developing interplanetary travel here, a dad joke when he could be welding together his own rocket boots there. Tony Stark, let’s not forget, can actually do wing chun. Musk refers to his own fighting style as “the walrus” – “I just lie on you.”
Ultimately, though, neither billionaire comes out of this very well, because – as you might remember from school, or the 1989 movie Road House – fighting doesn’t really prove anything. Recently, it’s become de rigueur for ideological opponents to offer each other out for a scrap, perhaps because being Good At Fighting – having the dedication to endure endless training sessions or the willpower to take a solid punch and keep going – feels like a proxy for other worthwhile qualities.
But – here’s the thing – it really isn’t. I could probably beat up 99% of the people I disagree with on Twitter, but that doesn’t make me more qualified than they are to opine on the housing crisis. Conversely, I’ve been beaten up by plenty of people, and half of them were even less informed than me.
So, Elon, Mark, by all means keep up the competitiveness – it’s a healthy quality. But could I humbly suggest that the real tussle should be to see who can fix the climate crisis the hardest? Anyone, after all, can climb into a cage – but it’s going to take a Tony Stark or a Lex Luthor to sort out the rest of the planet.
• Joel Snape is a writer and fitness expert
