In contrast, Twitter’s market cap (before Musk took it private) was around $41 billion and had around 368 million monthly active users in 2022. It’s true that Meta is the much bigger company, with a market cap of almost $747 billion and 3.8 billion monthly active users across all of its apps. Mark Zuckerberg’s not-so-secret plan to join the AI race Musk referenced this comment in the lead-up to the cage fight suggestion, tweeting, “I’m sure Earth can’t wait to be exclusively under Zuck’s thumb with no other options.” A top Meta executive boasted that their version would be “sanely run,” nodding to countless reports of Musk’s seemingly impetuous decisions since taking over Twitter. In March, tech newsletter Platformer reported that Meta was working on a Twitter-like, text-based social media app. Since then, Twitter’s declining stability, its ploys to charge users for features like identity-verifying blue check marks, and increasingly visible right-wing vitriol and hate speech (just this week, Musk declared “cisgender” a slur on Twitter) have been the subject of nonstop complaining and mockery. In the aftermath of the 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which troves of Facebook user data had been misused by a private data firm linked to the Trump campaign, Musk deleted the Facebook pages for Tesla and SpaceX.īut while the two men aren’t exactly friends, the promised Musk-Zuckerberg fight is actually about the competition of two similar businesses, which ramped up after Musk entered the social media arena last year by (reluctantly) buying Twitter. Zuckerberg, for his part, has not tweeted in over a decade.

In recent months, Musk has said that one of his goals with Twitter is to maximize “ unregretted user time” - perhaps a swipe at Meta. Musk is on record saying social media apps like Instagram negatively impact mental health. Things have been arguably a little frosty since then. The launch failed, and the satellite - which the company now known as Meta had been planning to use to provide internet service in parts of Africa - was destroyed. What set the stage for their “beef” was a SpaceX rocket carrying a Facebook-owned satellite in 2016. This entire idea might sound like a worrying fever dream, but it is in fact real - and the Musk versus Zuckerberg faceoff has somewhat of a history. “I think that narcissism can’t be underestimated,” Wilcox said. And Zuckerberg is the kind of guy who reportedly cuts his hair to look like Augustus Caesar. Musk has done stunts like this before to successfully win media attention, like smoking weed on Joe Rogan’s show or naming his dog the CEO of Twitter.

The younger generation of MMA fans in particular are “willing to fanboy for billionaires,” said Nate Wilcox, the owner of Bloody Elbow, a news site that covers MMA and other combat sports. Meanwhile, Musk’s reputation has plunged in the last year - data from Morning Consult from late 2022 indicated that his net favorability had fallen by 13 points among US adults, and even Tesla’s reputation has been dinged by his behavior.Įlon Musk won’t stop tweeting his way into troubleīut entertaining a fight like this also just seems to be a reflection of Musk’s and Zuckerberg’s sheer vanity. This shared plea for attention could be a means of distracting from news they might want to bury: Just before the cage fight news broke, Meta announced that it would cut off access to news on Facebook and Instagram in Canada following the passage of a law that requires such tech companies to compensate domestic media outlets when linking to their content. There’s a question as to whether this match is even going to happen, despite the back-and-forth social media banter between Musk and Zuckerberg, and Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) president Dana White’s assertion that “both guys are absolutely dead serious.” It would be a big spectacle of an MMA fight, but to an extent, Zuckerberg and Musk have already gotten the benefit of publicity by just talking about fighting. Elon Musk signaled his interest in the match on Twitter a few days ago Zuckerberg, naturally, confirmed that he was in through Instagram. They are 51 and 39 years old, respectively - and we regret to inform you that they’re gearing up for a cage fight at an unconfirmed location (but possibly in Las Vegas?) on a to-be-decided date. By “boys,” of course, we mean tech billionaires Elon Musk, who owns Tesla, SpaceX, and most recently Twitter, as well as Mark Zuckerberg, who founded Meta (formerly Facebook), which also owns Instagram and WhatsApp.

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