The attractiveness of the man is getting worse
Mark Zuckerberg and Mark’s Jeep: A Derailed Martial Arts Battle between Mark and Elon Musk and a Reckless Threat to Visit his Home
To be certain, Musk has barely trained for a fight at all, but he is not in physical danger from Zuckerberg. More important is the fact that due to very real threats against Zuckerberg’s safety, and his family’s safety, Meta will spend $14 million this year on security for him. Musk will be at higher risk relying on the full self-driving capability of his electric car than he would be if he showed up at the door.
Musk said on X that he would ask the car to go to his house for the test drive. The fight is on if we get lucky and Zuck answers the door.
“Mark is traveling right now and isn’t in Palo Alto,” Meta spokesperson Iska Saric told me Monday. Mark takes this sport very seriously and will not fight anyone who shows up at his door.
Today let’s talk — for the last time, I hope — about the derailed martial arts bout between Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, and the latter’s reckless threats to visit the Meta CEO at his home and broadcast it to the world.
I don’t want to endanger the lives of other people and the battle that no part of me has ever believed would take place. Last week, I encouraged my peers in the press not to write about Musk’s posts on X because of the importance of bringing skepticism to them. It’s clear that Musk has a reputation for seeking attention for his sake, and ignoring him feels like the best approach since many of his promises come to nothing.
At the same time, Musk remains the owner of one of the most prominent social networks, despite all he has done over the past year to diminish it. He is also co-founder and CEO of several other companies that are salient in the public imagination, including Tesla, Neuralink, and SpaceX, which among other things operates the Starlink service that provides internet service in Ukraine and more than 60 other countries.
I think that it matters if a person appears to lose his grip on reality. And after another few days of unhinged behavior, I don’t know what other conclusion about Musk you could reasonably draw.
I have to write “And then Musk said this!” to tell this story. And then he said that! in a fashion that I find obnoxious but unavoidable. Feel free to skip the next section if you are already up to speed.
Why Does Elon Musk Keep Getting Censored? An Analysis of Musk, Zuckerberg, and the Edgelord: Why Does he Keeps Getting Creepy?
He promised that the fight would be broadcasted on both X and Meta platforms and that it would be managed by his and Zuck’s foundations.
As before, Zuckerberg hadn’t agreed to any of this. Among other issues, giving the fight away for free would mean that it raised dramatically less money for charity. For Meta, from a public-relations standpoint, raising money for charity is a necessary pretext for doing the match at all — otherwise it’s just two rich tech guys fighting, and we get enough of that from quarterly earnings calls.
At that point, Zuckerberg had had enough. “I think we can all agree Elon isn’t serious and it’s time to move on,” he posted on Threads. Elon refused to confirm a date, then said he needed surgery, and then asked to play in my backyard. If he ever gets serious about a date and an official event, he knows how to reach me. Otherwise, time to move on.”
By now we are generally familiar with the kind of edgelord behavior Musk is engaging in here: making a threat — “I am coming to your house to fight you” — but doing so in a manner that, if pressed, he can throw his hands up and protest that it was all just a joke.
Surely broadcasting himself driving to Zuckerberg’s house to confront him would represent just as serious a violation. (Arguably more serious, given that @ElonJet posted on a multi-hour delay, and most people don’t have physical access to airport tarmacs.)
Source: Elon Musk keeps getting creepier
The Fate of the World’s Richest Man: A Case Study in the Making of the Most Distinct MMA Players in the World
What matters is not whether an MMA fight takes place. It’s that the world’s richest man — a person with a security clearance and government contracts and more than a little power over Ukraine’s continued internet access — is threatening to hunt down a rival CEO at his house and challenge him to a duel.
To his dwindling fan base, all this will play out like a scene from their real life Iron Man. But to his employees, his investors, his family and his friends — I wonder if they don’t see something stranger, and darker, going on.
