Last week — in the ever-growing sector of the news cycle called “did I dream it?” — Twitter owner Elon Musk suggested to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg that they settle their, essentially trifling, differences in a cage fight.
Zuckerberg, rather than saying: “Elon, that’s insane, you’re 51 years old and the richest person in human history, and I’m not far behind,” ostensibly replied: “Sure. Where and when?”
For those of us old enough to remember, the circus rivaled the one that accompanied the 2002, celebrity-adjacent, boxing-adjacent contest between Ricky Gervais and Grant Bovey.
Dana White, the bombastic president of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, revealing a surprising ignorance of the historic beef between the animal-loving comedian and Anthea Turner’s wrong’un ex-husband, predicted that the Musk-Zuckerberg clash would break all records.
“This would be the biggest fight ever in the history of the world,” he said.
Fighting used to be regarded as a way out of poverty. Manny Pacquiao, an all-time boxing great, grew up in extreme destitution in the Philippines (last year, he ran for president). So, how to explain why two men with a combined wealth of US$340 billion would choose to step into the octagon in Las Vegas and bash seven shades out of each other?
White talked of the “hundreds of millions of dollars” they would raise for charity, but no one was buying that. If Musk and Zuckerberg were really interested in philanthropy, they could drop billions without getting a black eye and a busted ego.
More persuasive is the theory that the fight was an extreme case of a pair of tech bros going rogue. In many ways, this made sense: Musk and Zuckerberg have amassed unimaginable riches and both have, presumably, had to stare down the question of what a meaningful life entails.
For Zuckerberg, this led to a year of eating wild boars that he killed with a bow and arrow. Recently, he has become obsessed with Brazilian jujutsu, winning a couple of medals at a competition in California.
He is not alone among high-profile men in testing himself this way. The actor Tom Hardy made a surprise appearance in a Brazilian jujutsu tournament in Milton Keynes, England, last year, winning all his bouts.
There is also a simpler explanation for what has happened: Musk was clearly joking and whoosh, it flew straight over Zuckerberg’s head. You might expect the men who between them control Twitter, Instagram and Facebook to know better, but social media is an atrocious place to have any kind of discussion, which is why it so often descends into a trash fire.
Sarcasm is the first casualty of digital conversations. Musk even put “lol” at the end of his initial response to the idea of a cage fight.
The Musk-Zuckerberg spat mainly shows how far social media has fallen from its original ideals. In 2010, Zuckerberg was named Time’s Person of the Year and praised for his efforts to “tame the howling mob and turn the lonely, antisocial world of random chance into a friendly world.”
Alternatively, you can just settle your disagreements with a fight in a cage.
Tim Lewis is an Observer columnist.
On May 7, 1971, Henry Kissinger planned his first, ultra-secret mission to China and pondered whether it would be better to meet his Chinese interlocutors “in Pakistan where the Pakistanis would tape the meeting — or in China where the Chinese would do the taping.” After a flicker of thought, he decided to have the Chinese do all the tape recording, translating and transcribing. Fortuitously, historians have several thousand pages of verbatim texts of Dr. Kissinger’s negotiations with his Chinese counterparts. Paradoxically, behind the scenes, Chinese stenographers prepared verbatim English language typescripts faster than they could translate and type them
More than 30 years ago when I immigrated to the US, applied for citizenship and took the 100-question civics test, the one part of the naturalization process that left the deepest impression on me was one question on the N-400 form, which asked: “Have you ever been a member of, involved in or in any way associated with any communist or totalitarian party anywhere in the world?” Answering “yes” could lead to the rejection of your application. Some people might try their luck and lie, but if exposed, the consequences could be much worse — a person could be fined,
Xiaomi Corp founder Lei Jun (雷軍) on May 22 made a high-profile announcement, giving online viewers a sneak peek at the company’s first 3-nanometer mobile processor — the Xring O1 chip — and saying it is a breakthrough in China’s chip design history. Although Xiaomi might be capable of designing chips, it lacks the ability to manufacture them. No matter how beautifully planned the blueprints are, if they cannot be mass-produced, they are nothing more than drawings on paper. The truth is that China’s chipmaking efforts are still heavily reliant on the free world — particularly on Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing
On May 13, the Legislative Yuan passed an amendment to Article 6 of the Nuclear Reactor Facilities Regulation Act (核子反應器設施管制法) that would extend the life of nuclear reactors from 40 to 60 years, thereby providing a legal basis for the extension or reactivation of nuclear power plants. On May 20, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) legislators used their numerical advantage to pass the TPP caucus’ proposal for a public referendum that would determine whether the Ma-anshan Nuclear Power Plant should resume operations, provided it is deemed safe by the authorities. The Central Election Commission (CEC) has
RSS