If you’re 51 years old and thinking of stepping inside a cage to fight for the first time, you really can’t do better than having Georges St-Pierre as a training partner.
Perhaps that’s the realization Elon Musk came to as he accepted the UFC Hall of Famer’s offer to train him for a proposed fight with Mark Zuckerberg that UFC president Dana White is somehow seriously considering hosting inside the octagon.
This past Saturday, St-Pierre was one of a plethora of UFC fighters past and present to throw their names in the hat to train the billionaire tech titans.
“@elonmusk I’m a huge fan of yours and it would be an absolute honor to help you and be your training partner for the challenge against Zuckerberg,” St-Pierre tweeted.
On Monday evening, GSP got the response he was looking for.
“OK, let’s do it,” Musk responded.
Ok, let’s do it 🔥🔥
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 27, 2023
If the fight does happen and they do train together, Musk would be in good hands with St-Pierre. The 42-year-old Canadian is widely considered the greatest mixed martial artist of all time after a career in which he won two UFC division championships – at welterweight and middleweight – including a dominant run of nine consecutive title defenses at 170 pounds from 2008 until 2013. St-Pierre retired in 2013 and returned four years later to claim the 185-pound title from Michael Bisping in November 2017 at UFC 217. He retired shortly after because of health concerns and hasn’t competed since.
The potential fight between Musk, the CEO of Twitter and Tesla, and Zuckerberg, the CEO of Instagram and Facebook parent company Meta, came about after Zuckerberg accepted Musk’s challenge during a social media spat. While it seemed like nothing more than internet tough-guy talk, White said the next day that both men were “dead serious” about meeting inside the cage and that he welcomed building a UFC pay-per-view event around a headliner of Musk vs. Zuckerberg.
As of this writing, Zuckerberg, who has a background in jiu-jitsu, has yet to publicly accept any offers to train, including from current UFC heavyweight champion Jon Jones.
