During the long lazy summer of 2023 the world’s demoralised heart beat a little faster at the prospect of seeing tech billionaires Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg slip into their itsy-bitsy UFC shorts and square up in the fighting cage.
They were eager to conquer new worlds – namely, one another. When you have all the money in the world and aren’t big on reading the classics, life must get boring. The New York Times confirmed that the rumours had substance. It reported that Zuckerberg contacted Dana White, the overlord of all things ultimate fighting, leading to one of the more delightful lines ever published on the pages of the Grey Lady: ”Mr White called Mr Musk, who runs Tesla, Twitter and SpaceX, and confirmed that he was willing to throw down. Mr White then relayed that to Mr Zuckerberg. In response Mr Zuckerberg posted on Instagram: ‘Send Me Location,’ a reference to the catchphrase of Khabib Nurmagomedov, one of the UFC’s most decorated athletes.”
Not quite Ali-Frazier but...thrilling stuff! Suddenly the very point of the existence of these two peculiar men, ubiquitous forces in all our lives and seldom anything other than vanilla in their public interviews, seemed somehow touching. They may each be as rich as Croesus but deep down they still craved the approval of the schoolyard crowd. They had to prove something.
Sadly the ”fight” never happened. Musk may have gambled on Zuckerberg not moving to formalise their gentlemen’s quarrel; may have realised that the Facebook guy maintains a rigorous training schedule and that he did not want to get punched in the face or have the Zuck grapple him in tender places. By August the fight of, well, the day if not the century, was all over. The entire episode mirrored the very sensation of the social media age: fleeting happiness followed by lasting hollowness.
Worse was to come for Musk. In February Bloomberg ran a story that investors had made their minds up about the ”magnificent seven” companies and that Tesla was looking like the runt in the litter.
Nobody would have predicted then that just seven months later Musk would be lumbering across the campaign rally stage alongside the ascendant Donald Trump, raising both arms in triumph like good old Rocky Balboa, clearly delighting in the sound that money cannot buy: spontaneous, genuine cheering and adoration from the crowd. By December Musk was parading X, his young son, on his shoulders as he moved through the Capitol, a host of Republican lawmakers trotting after him as they discussed his plans for the Department of Government Efficiency. For an investment of $277 million (€268 million) in the Trump campaign it was estimated in early November that his wealth had increased by $200 billion.
Zuckerberg, meanwhile, recently announced that Facebook would abandon its efforts to be ”arbiters of the truth” by ending its independent fact-checking in the US, a dismaying move. This week Zuckerberg showed up in Joe Rogan’s studio wearing a heavy neck chain and making a pitch for a return of a bit of old world machismo to the corporate culture which, he said, had become “pretty culturally neutral”. Rogan is regarded as an affable podcast host but there was an element of hazing about the entire show, particularly when Zuckerberg suggested that he liked to go mountain hunting with a crossbow.
“What kind of bow do you have?” Rogan asked, doing the slack-jawed scepticism thing. “Gosh,” Zuckerberg replied. “I didn’t get to do it this season.”
“Do you know the company who makes it?”
“Not off the top of my head.”
It was an exercise in humiliation as Zuckerberg attempts to publicly atone for what the incoming president may see as past misdeeds. In September Trump had claimed in his latest book that Zuckerberg plotted against him ahead of the 2020 election and warned: “We are watching him closely, and if he does anything illegal this time he will spend the rest of his life in prison – as will others who cheat in the 2024 presidential election.”
So Mark Zuckerberg will join the other pale technology billionaires at Trump’s second inauguration on Monday.
“To go up there and bend the knee...it feels like we have gone full oligarchy,” said entrepreneur and public speaker Scott Galloway on Thursday evening.
“It’s kind of disappointing because I don’t think these individuals necessarily support his [Trump’s] policies. You could argue most generously that they are doing good for their shareholders, recognising that if they complement, support the president and give his committee money they are going to see a return on that. That’s basically an oligarchy. So I think it is shocking but not surprising. The most generous thing you could say right now is that he is being a pragmatic billionaire totally focused on shareholder value – as are to be fair Jeff Bezos and Tim Cook. But at some point what is the point of having all of this money if you can’t stand up for traditional American values or quite frankly stick up the middle finger if someone is trying to intimidate you or put you in prison.”
In the end Musk didn’t even have to enter the cage and still gets to see Zuckerberg tap out.