It enrages me that I do, but I know where Mark Zuckerberg placed in his first Brazilian jiu-jitsu tournament, and I know how he came to take up the sport in the first place. He had a lot of free time during Covid, he says, and when you think about it, sure, if you take away all the pressures of that period – worrying about your livelihood, your future at work, the future of work, your loved ones and humanity as a whole – then you would end up with quite a lot of free time.
It makes my blood boil that I do, but I also know Elon Musk’s height advantage over Zuckerberg (6ft 1in to 5ft 7in) and his signature move, the walrus, in which he lies on top of his opponent and wins by doing nothing.
It’s pretty unclear what will happen if one emerges victorious: does the other one die of a broken ego? Have they war-gamed the gravity of such a wound in advance, and already decided to call a draw? Is it all an elaborate, attention-seeking bluff? What even counts as being made a fool of, in this enterprise in which everybody – Zuckerberg, Musk, their training entourage, their cheerleaders, their detractors – looks entirely foolish?
They’re interesting, billionaires, and when I say interesting, I mean it in the way that a bear is interesting as it hurtles towards you. Should you freeze or run away? Do you have time to trap it? They want us talking about them, but not about their real impact on the world; they want to be declared the victor, but not “over civil society”, in case civil society wakes up and gets its act together; they think they are superhuman, having bought their way out of any objective community that would tell them they aren’t.
There’s a little bit of hypermasculinity going on – you won’t find Chu Lam Yiu challenging Margaret Magerko to a dance-off – but in essence this is the silliness of extreme wealth, the endpoint of how big a delusion money can buy. If we hope one of them mixed-martial-artses the other to death, suddenly we’re the bad guys. The problem with ignoring them is they don’t go away.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
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