One of the more bizarre stories of the week is the news of a proposed cage fight between tech billionaires Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. Yes. Seriously.
Last week, in response to news that Zuckerberg-owned Meta was planning to launch a competitor product to Musk-owned Twitter, Musk tweeted that he was “up for a cage fight” with Zuckerberg.
With Zuckerberg replying “send me location,” Musk then suggested “Vegas Octagon” – a famous UFC arena.
For now, it seems like this may not just be social media beef, with Ultimate Fighting Championship president Dana White telling TMZ Sports that “Both guys are absolutely dead serious about this. They both said, ‘Yeah, we’ll do it!’”
White also said that if the broadcast went ahead, it “would break all pay per view records.”
“This would be the biggest fight ever in the history of the world, bigger than anything that’s ever been done.”
In fact, White goes so far as to say that he believes that Musk taking on Zuckerberg could “triple” the revenue of 2017’s match between Floyd Mayweather and Conor McGregor (which made more than US$600 million in total revenue), and make “hundreds of millions of dollars” – although he specifies that both billionaires would donate the winnings to charity.
White continued to hype the potential fight on socials, saying that “This isn’t a gimmick fight. Gimmick is MMA guys going to boxing and getting beat. We have seen it already and know how it ends.
“This is a fight between two of the most powerful, richest guys in the world. Who will win? Who has seen this before? NOBODY.”
Back at their respective companies, Meta began its third and final round of job cuts last month, focusing on its business and operations units. The job cuts included marketing, site security, enterprise engineering, program management, content strategy, and corporate communications, as well as the tech giant’s privacy and integrity units, according to Reuters.
After a tumultuous stint as CEO of Twitter – which included posting a poll asking whether he should step down from the role – Elon Musk announced last month that NBCUniversal’s Linda Yaccarino would be taking over the top job.