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.
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.
He texted Zuckerberg to ask, “Wanna do a practice bout at your house next week?” We know this because Musk’s biographer, Walter Isaacson, shared a screenshot of the conversation yesterday.
Two hours later, Musk upped the ante, saying he would take a Tesla to Palo Alto on Monday night and broadcast the drive on X, “so you can monitor our adventure in real-time!
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.
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.