Just a normal beef between billionaire bros with raging egos. The feud started when Musk responded to a June 20 Twitter thread mocking Zuckerberg, with Musk writing, “I’m up for a cage match if he is lol.” That was in response to a user saying Zuckerberg “does the ju jitsu now,” a reference to his medaling in a Brazilian jiujitsu tournament. Zuckerberg fired back the same day in an Instagram Story with a screenshot of Musk’s cage-match tweet and the caption, “Send Me Location.” Musk at one point suggested “a literal dick-measuring contest” between the two men. Italian officials even expressed interest in a hosting a charity cage match between the two.
Note that Musk was pissed about Meta’s launch of Twitter-copycat Threads and threatened to sue the rival, alleging Meta had hired “dozens” of Twitter employees and had misappropriated “Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property.” (Meta disputed the claims, saying no one on the Threads team had worked at Twitter.)
Were either of them actually serious about an MMA brawl? It seems like Zuckerberg was — but that Musk was just trolling. After claiming the fight would be held in Italy, Musk wrote on Twitter, “Dulce est desipere in loco,” a quote from Horace’s “Odes” that has been translated as, “It is delightful to play the fool occasionally.”
By August, after calling Musk’s bluff, Zuck said it was “time to move on.” “I think we can all agree Elon isn’t serious,” Zuckerberg wrote on Threads, noting he had “offered a real date” for a fight which Musk wouldn’t confirm. In response, Musk claimed he would use a beta version of Tesla’s Full-Self Driving feature to ferry him over to Zuckerberg’s Palo Alto estate and that if Zuck “actually answers the door, the fight is on!” (A Meta rep said Zuckerberg would not “fight someone who randomly shows up at his house.”)