Musk and Mark: Joke about cage fighting: The social media drama continues
Last week, “Did I Dream It?” In an ever-increasing segment of the news cycle, Twitter owner Elon Musk suggested to meta boss Mark Zuckerberg that they settle their, essentially trivial, differences in a cage fight. , Instead of saying, “Elon, that’s crazy, you’re 51 years old and the richest man in human history, and I’m not far behind”, Zuckerberg replied directly: “Sure. Where and when?”
For those of us old enough to remember, Circus competed in 2002 with the celebrity-adjacent, boxing-adjacent contest between Ricky Gervais and Grant Bowe. Revealing astonishing ignorance of the historical beef between the animal-loving comedian and Anthea Turner’s errant ‘un ex-husband’, Dana White, the pompous president of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, predicted that the Musk-Zuckerberg clash would break all records. “It will be the biggest battle ever fought in the history of the world,” he said.
Fighting was considered a way out of poverty. Boxing’s all-time great Manny Pacquiao grew up in extreme poverty in the Philippines (last year, he ran for president). So, how to explain why two men with a combined net worth of $340 billion would choose to step into the Octagon in Las Vegas and give each other the Seven Evils?
The UFC’s White spoke of the “hundreds of millions of dollars” they would be raising for charity, but no one was buying it. If Musk and Zuckerberg were really interested in philanthropy, they could plunk down billions of dollars without disrespecting anyone and busting their egos. The more persuasive theory is that the fight was an extreme case of a pair of techno brothers going rogue. In many ways, it made sense. Both Musk and Zuckerberg have amassed unimaginable wealth and, possibly, both have had to ponder the question of what constitutes a meaningful life. For Zuckerberg, this led him to eat wild boar for a year which he killed with a bow and arrow. Laterly, winning a few medals at a competition in California, the Brazilian became obsessed with Jiu-Jitsu. He’s not the only high-profile person to test himself this way: actor Tom Hardy made a surprise appearance at a Brazilian jiu-jitsu tournament in Milton Keynes last year and won all his bouts.
But there’s also a simpler explanation for what happened: Musk was clearly joking and it flew straight over Zuckerberg’s head. You might expect the people who control Twitter, Instagram and Facebook to know better, but social media is a cruel place for any kind of discussion, which is why it often ends up in the trash. . Sarcasm is the digital conversation’s first victim: Musk even put a “lol” at the end of his initial response to the cage fight idea.
The Musk-Zuckerberg controversy primarily shows how far social media has fallen from its original ideals. In 2010, Zuckerberg was named Time’s Person of the Year and was praised for his efforts to “tame the howling crowd and turn the lonely, antisocial world of random chance into a friendly one”.
Alternatively, you can settle your disagreements by cage fighting. Despite being unrelated to Facebook and Tesla, both of these companies are important players in the tech industry.
