35: The Precarious Manhood of Billionaires The Nice-ish Ramblings Podcast

Hi there. How are you? Hopefully, you’re having a nice day. Today, can we please talk about Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk wanting to fight each other? I have been fascinated by all of this since the initial reports of this fight being declared. However, when it all kicked off, I didn’t say much about it as I wanted to see how it all played out. But it doesn’t seem to be fizzling out at all. So here we are to think about how all of this – how this very public display of bravado – relates to a concept known as precarious manhood.
In case you are unaware, two of the most prominent tech bros, Zuckerberg and Musk, have been embroiled in a highly publicised feud. There’s obviously been some longstanding animosity between the two, given the fact that they both own two of the biggest social media companies. Still, things seemed to turn up a notch around the time that Zuckerberg was set to launch Threads. Which bears a striking resemblance to Twitter (now currently known as X, but I will continue to refer to it as Twitter because I can’t bring myself to call it X. I just think it’s a really fucking silly name. But anyway). Reports suggest that Musk was quite displeased about this development, and on June 20th, 2023, he took to Twitter to challenge Zuckerberg to a cage fight. I mean, the Tweet literally reads, “I’m up for a cage match if he is.” Which, I’m not going to lie, doesn’t feel like a very thought-through Tweet. The challenge was met with a response from Zuckerberg, who took to Instagram to inquire about the location, with Musk then suggesting the UFC Octagon in Las Vegas.
Now you would be forgiven for thinking that the situation would just have stopped there; however, it seems to have only escalated as time’s gone by.
While nothing has been set in stone – like no date or actual venue has been set – allegedly, UFC president, Dana White, wants the fight to happen and is trying to make the fight a reality. He’s been quoted as saying: “This would be the biggest fight ever in the history of the world, bigger than anything that’s ever been done. It would break all pay-per-view records.” So, we can see what his motivations might be to make this fight take place. More recently, Elon Musk has noted that the fight would be live-streamed on Twitter and that any money made would go to a charity for veterans. It seems like Musk might need to let Dana White know about what’s gonna happen with all that pay-per-view money. But, in discussing how likely the fight would be to happen, Dana White was of the opinion that Zuckerberg is taking this very seriously.
And he’s not wrong.
It’s been recently reported that Mark Zuckerberg has been training in Jujitsu for over a year and has recently been awarded his blue belt (no idea if that’s good or not, but it sounds impressive) and has also been winning competitions while he’s been at. In training for the fight, he’s reportedly been consuming 4,000 calories a day and has also reportedly (and if this is not a sign of escalation, then I don’t know what it is) had his own cage-fighting octagon installed in his garden, which his wife is apparently less than pleased about. Also, it’s been reported that Zuckerberg has been training with actual UFC stars Israel Adesanya and Alex Volkanovski (I have no idea who these people are, but if you’re into UFC you might be impressed). Volkanovski has noted that he believes Zuckerberg is serious about fighting Musk and is quoted as saying: “Man, I'm telling you he [Zuckerberg] is serious. I don't know how serious Elon is, but I'm telling you, he [Zuckerberg] is training.” So, it seems that at least one of the billionaires preparing for a fight.
Musk, on the other hand, seems to be somewhat less prepared. In all fairness, Musk has reportedly often spoken about being in “real hard-core street fights” while growing up in South Africa, with his father, Errol Musk, noting that Elon had once “aced a p