- Elon Musk said he'd be up for fighting his tech world nemesis, jiu-jitsu lover Mark Zuckerberg.
- "I'm up for a cage match if he is lol," Musk tweeted on Tuesday night.
Elon Musk says he'd be up for settling his beef with Mark Zuckerberg in the ring.
On Tuesday night, Musk took to Twitter to respond to unsubstantiated rumors that Meta might soon launch a rival to Musk's Twitter, called Threads. Musk wrote on Twitter that the launch of such a platform would eventually put the Earth "exclusively under Zuck's thumb with no other options."
One Twitter user responded to Musk's Zuck-zinger, writing: "Better be careful @elonmusk I heard he does the ju jitsu now."
Musk, in turn, tweeted: "I'm up for a cage match if he is lol."
While we can only assume Musk's cage fight proposition is a joke, Musk and Zuckerberg have in the past traded words over their respective tech kingdoms.
In 2016, Zuckerberg said he was "deeply disappointed" in SpaceX after one of the company's rockets destroyed a Facebook satellite.
In February 2020, Musk asked people to delete Facebook because it's "lame." And in May, Musk escalated the long-running disagreement again, saying he thinks Zuckerberg seems "extremely partisan" and that WhatsApp "cannot be trusted."
For his part, Zuckerberg has had the occasional kind word for Musk. In June, he lauded Musk for making Twitter "leaner" amid Zuckerberg's own drive to flatten Meta's management structure.
In the very, very slim chance that Musk and Zuckerberg were to meet in the cage, Musk would find a tough opponent in his tech world nemesis: Zuckerberg has been looking totally shredded lately. Zuckerberg said in May that he won two medals at a jiu-jitsu tournament in Redwood City, California. The Meta CEO has been training for over a year — in August, he said that he surfed and did a lot of martial arts during the pandemic.
Zuckerberg isn't the first person Musk has challenged to a fight.
In March 2022, Musk challenged Russian leader Vladimir Putin to "single combat" over Ukraine. Musk offered to let Putin "bring his bear" to the fight, suggesting that he would use a Boring Company flamethrower as his own weapon of choice.
Musk's challenge to the Russian president was summarily mocked at the time by Putin loyalist and Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov and Russian space chief Dmitry Rogozin.
Representatives for Zuckerberg at Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Insider sent outside regular business hours.