London
CNN
—
Business rivalry seemingly isn’t enough for two of the tech industry’s most powerful billionaires. Now Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg say they want to settle their scores in a cage fight.
Twitter owner and Tesla
(TSLA) CEO Musk recently tweeted that he would be “up for a cage fight” with Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta. In an Instagram story Wednesday, Zuckerberg fired back by posting a screenshot of Musk’s tweet overlaid with the caption: “Send Me Location.”
Musk then responded to a tweet about the fight by Alex Heath, editor of tech news website Verge, with “Vegas Octagon” — a reference to the Las Vegas arena that hosts the Ultimate Fighting Championship.
“I have this great move that I call ‘The Walrus,’ where I just lie on top of my opponent & do nothing,” he added in a separate tweet.
CNN has contacted Meta for comment. A spokesperson for the company told Verge: “The [Instagram] story speaks for itself.”
It remains unclear whether Zuckerberg and Musk are serious or having a laugh.
Quite who would win in a cage fight, however, remains to be seen. Musk is physically bigger than Zuckerberg, but the Meta chief practices jiu-jitsu, the Brazilian martial art, and won gold and silver in a tournament in May.
Oddspedia, a sports betting platform, collated odds from several different bookmakers, including Bovada, Bet Online and Ladbrokes, and concluded that Zuckerberg has an 83% chance of winning the fight.
Meanwhile, bookmaker Paddy Power is betting the match never happens, but that if it does, both men have an equal chance of winning.
“If this fight does actually go ahead, with a bit of luck, they’ll both knock some sense into each other,” a spokesperson for the Irish company said in a statement.
The two — who in the past jostled for a high spot on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index before Musk became the world’s richest man — have clashed before.
In 2017, they engaged in a very public feud over the future of artificial intelligence.
Musk had repeatedly warned about the dangers of AI, describing it as a potentially existential threat to the human race. Zuckerberg, on the other hand, took a much more optimistic view.
During a Facebook Live broadcast at the time he dismissed “naysayers” who sketched out “doomsday scenarios” as being “pretty irresponsible.”
Musk shot back shortly afterward, tweeting: “I’ve talked to Mark about this. His understanding of the subject is pretty limited.”
Musk knocked Zuckerberg from the number three spot on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index in 2020, before becoming the richest person in the world soon after that.
He was briefly ousted from the top spot in December by Bernard Arnault, the chairman of French luxury goods giant LVMH
(LVMHF), before reclaiming his title in May. Zuckerberg is now in the 10th position.
