How serious are Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg about a proposed fight inside a cage? According to UFC president Dana White, “both guys are absolutely dead serious.”
In an interview with TMZ on Thursday, White said he “probably spent an hour-and-a-half on the phone” with both of the world’s most high-profile tech billionaires and found out that neither of them was kidding about a proposed cage match stemming from a social media spat.
“They both said, ‘Yeah, we’ll do it.’ They both want to do it,” White said. “Mark Zuckerberg hit me up first and said, ‘Is (Elon) serious?’ And I said, ‘I don’t know, let me ask him.’ I asked him, and he said, ‘Yeah, I’m dead serious.’”
How it started
The initial exchange – between the CEO of Twitter and the founder and CEO of Facebook and Instagram parent company Meta – came on the heels of Musk tweeting, “I’m sure Earth can’t wait to be exclusively under Zuck’s thumb with no other options.” When a Twitter user jokingly cautioned Musk to watch what he says given Zuckerberg’s jiu-jitsu skills, Musk said, “I’m up for a cage match if he is lol.”
That was all Zuckerberg needed to see as he responded in an Instagram story with the Khabib Nurmagomedov-inspired message of “send me location.”
“Vegas Octagon” Musk responded, adding: “I have this great move that I call ‘The Walrus’ where I just lie on top of my opponent & do nothing.”
White all in on charity event
An actual fight between Musk and Zuckerberg seems unfathomable, but White said he’s “taking it very serious” after speaking with both men. White is willing to build an entire card with “some really fun fights,” with Musk vs. Zuckerberg as the pay-per-view headliner.
“Listen, if these guys are serious, I make fights that people want to see,” White said. “That’s what I do for a living. If they really want to do it and they’re serious, and we can figure out a way to pull this off, I would absolutely, positively do this.”
White said Musk and Zuckerberg could each pick a charity to donate the proceeds from a pay-per-view that would cost “probably a hundred bucks.”
‘Everybody would want to see it’
The amount of money generated by a Musk vs. Zuckerberg fight could be massive, and White knows it.
“This would be the biggest fight ever in the history of the world, bigger than anything that’s ever been done,” White said. “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 fight fan to be interested in this fight. Everybody would want to see it.”
White was involved in one massive money-making fight before when the UFC allowed Conor McGregor to box Floyd Mayweather in August 2017. It was the second-highest selling pay-per-view of all time, with 4.3 million buys domestically.
White expects that a fight between Musk and Zuckerberg would blow that number away by a wide margin.
“I think it triples that. There’s no limit on what this thing could make,” White said. “… Everybody would watch it. Everybody would want to see it.”
