UFC middleweight fighter Sean Strickland has said he would train Elon Musk to defeat Mark Zuckerberg in a proposed cage match between billionaire executives. The Tesla and Meta chiefs have each claimed they are willing to go head-to-head in a fight.
Strickland expressed hatred of Zuckerberg's social media conglomerate, bizarrely calling the executive a "dirty communist" in a social media rant. The 32-year-old professional mixed martial arts star is ranked seventh in the UFC for his weight class and could prove an asset for Musk.
"Man f*** Mark Zuckerberg," tweeted Strickland. "Dirty communist.... No one wants your goggles and your disinformation censorship but.... Facebook market gets a pass.... @elonmusk come to Vegas. We will put in work!"
Meanwhile, UFC president Dana White has confirmed to TMZ that Musk and Zuckerberg are "dead serious" about following through with their duel. White called the potential event the "biggest fight ever in the history of the world."
"Bigger than anything that's ever been done," White explained. "It would break all pay-per-view records. These guys would raise hundreds of millions of dollars for charity. You don't have to be a fighting fan to be interested in this fight. Everybody would want to see it."
"The biggest fight of all time was Floyd Mayweather and Conor [McGregor], I just think it triples that. I think it triples what that did. There's no limit on what that thing can make. … Everybody would watch it, everybody would want to see it."
Zuckerberg is said to be a Brazilian jiu-jitsu aficionado. People questioned his fighting skill level earlier this month, though, when he was reportedly knocked unconscious in a staged fight with a fellow tech worker.
A referee said he heard the Harvard dropout snore on the mat. However, a Meta spokesperson rushed to deny that happened, claiming to The Daily Beast that "at no point during the competition was Mark knocked unconscious."
"That never happened," the Meta official said, with the company adding that the sounds from Zuckerberg were not snoring but "effortful grunting."
Musk and Zuckerberg used their platforms this week to agree to fight one another. White has since served as a middle-man between Musk and Zuckerberg as the possibility of the clash grows, knowing that he could benefit from the publicity of an absurd bout.
In addition to overseeing Tesla, Musk founded Space X and the Boring Company while purchasing a majority stake in Twitter last year. He is currently Twitter's chairman after stepping aside as CEO. Zuckerberg, meanwhile, built the social media powerhouse Facebook and has since expanded his company to include other influential products, such as Instagram, under the corporate name Meta.
According to Forbes, Musk is the wealthiest man in the world as of Friday morning, ahead of Mark Zuckerberg in ninth place. Their net worths dramatically fluctuate because they are closely tied to the volatile stock market.
Musk is 6'2" with an unknown weight. Zuckerberg is 5'8" tall and reportedly weighs around 70kg. But size won't necessarily determine the outcome in a matchup of relatively unskilled fighters who are unlikely to put on an aesthetically pleasing show.
