Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, owner of SpaceX and Twitter X, seemingly upset by the launch and early success of Meta's Threads, thought it would be a good idea to challenge rival tech baron Mark Zuckerberg to a literal fist fight — an unsurprisingly it fell apart after Zuckerberg said "alright, let's do it" and made moves to make it happen.
Musk has long treated social media like something of a playground, frequently dumping whatever thoughts pop into his head onto Twitter X. I'll admit that I used to do the same thing, but I'm also not a tech billionaire who is busy leading multiple high-profile companies working on important things. He's posted many inane and insane things over the years, which has garnered him a particularly ardent fan base who likes him for "calling things as they see him."
Musk is a man of mercurial ideas and obsessions — some good, some bad, some bizzare.
Which is fine, I suppose. Musk is a man of mercurial ideas and obsessions, and for every time he's done something like the hasty submarine to rescue the kids that were stuck in a Thailand cave in 2018 (and then called a diver that helped in the rescue a "pedo guy" after he criticized Musk's efforts), there's also an impressive and good for the world thing that he's done.
While Musk didn't found Tesla, his involvement helped elevate and drive the company into kickstarting the electric cars revolution that major automakers are finally buying into. The insane ideas behind his founding SpaceX have dramatically lowered to cost of launching to space by reusing rockets, and the Starlink satellite internet constellation they're building could change the way many connect to the internet around the globe.
And then he goes and posts something ridiculous like challenging Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg to a cage match fight.
Unlike many of the other times where Musk has posted something ridiculous and it just went nowhere, Zuckerberg picked up that gauntlet and ran with it. Which might not have been Musk's best idea, given that Zuckerberg has been training with actual UFC fighters and is looking particularly jacked these days (perhaps following in the footsteps of the also-jacked and also-tech-billionaire Jeff Bezos of Amazon).
I don't want to mock anybody's body type, but, uh, Musk has never been one that's looked like he works out a lot, much less trains extensively for the kind of fighting he challenged Zuckerberg to. Though that hasn't stopped his fans on Twitter X from photoshopping his head onto the muscle-bound bodies of other men (stop me if that sounds like somebody else's fan club).
Despite Musk's claims that he's arranging this for charity and coordinated it with the Italian government to host, he's also thrown out delays like needing surgery. I won't begrudge anybody for needing repairs to their body — I've had the same, but I also wouldn't be challenging somebody to a fight knowing that I also need surgery that will take months to recover from.
After going around and around, Zuckerberg called off the proposed fight.
Post by @zuckView on Threads
Zuck is a busy man, after all. But so is Elon, or at least he should be. But it seems that owning Twitter X hasn't slowed the near constant stream of shit posting that has defined @elonmusk over the past few years. Just from today:
(for context, @finkd is Zuckerberg's account on X)
Is this the end of the dumbest story in tech in 2023? I sure hope so.
That or I'm going to see in the news tomorrow morning that Elon Musk was shooed away by the police after he parked outside Mark Zuckerberg's house with a bullhorn shouting at him to come out and fight him "like a man".
Between fires and wars and coups and everything else there's already enough bullshit going on this year, I don't need that added to the mix, thank you very much.
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