According to UFC President Dana White, billionaire industrialist Elon Musk and Meta owner Mark Zuckerberg are "absolutely dead serious" about a cage battle in a UFC Octagon.
In an interview with TMZ Sports on June 22, White stated that he had recently been in contact with the two social media executives and that both had made it clear that they want to square off in Las Vegas.
“Talked with Mark and Elon last night, both guys are absolutely dead serious about this,” White said. “They both said, ‘Yeah, we’ll do it.’ They both want to do it,” he added.
The bout, according to White, "would be the biggest fight ever in the history of the world, bigger than anything that's ever been done," and it would likely generate hundreds of millions of dollars for charitable causes.
“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 UFC president continued.
White noted that the biggest fight of all time was Floyd Mayweather and Conor McGregor. That fight took place in 2017 and Mayweather defeated his rival.
“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,” White said of a potential spar between Zuckerberg and Musk.
This week, amid rumors that Zuckerberg is developing a program resembling Twitter, which Musk acquired in October 2022 for $44 billion, reports of a potential conflict between the two billionaires started to circulate.
According to The Verge, the new app would be built on Instagram, a platform owned by Meta Platforms Inc., and will interface with ActivityPub, a decentralized social media protocol.
Chris Cox, the chief product officer at Meta, claimed in a company-wide meeting earlier this month that the app was a direct response to Twitter. Cox also said that the company had been "hearing from creators and public figures who are interested in having a platform that is sanely run, that they believe that they can trust and rely upon for distribution," according to the publication.
SpaceX CEO Musk joined in when some Twitter users pointed out that Zuckerberg practices Brazilian jiu-jitsu (BJJ) as word of the upcoming app spread on social media.
Earlier this year, in May, Zuckerberg said on Instagram that he had participated in his first jiu-jitsu competition and "won some medals" for the Guerrilla jiu-jitsu squad.
“I’m sure Earth can’t wait to be exclusively under Zuck’s thumb with no other options,” Musk, who recently revealed that he was involved in “real hard-core street fights” as a youth in South Africa, wrote, adding “I’m up for a cage match if he is lol.”
