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Last week, Elon Musk treated us to one of the weirder headlines to come out of Silicon Valley in recent memory when he said he’d be down to face off against Mark Zuckerberg in a cage match before the man best known for bringing Facebook into the world made it very clear he’d be happy to accept the challenge.
At first glance, it seemed like Zuckerberg had the edge on paper when you consider he won a gold medal at his first jiu-jitsu competition earlier this year (although he may or may not have been choked out by an opponent).
Musk may have an edge in the height and weight categories, but most sportsbooks seemed to agree that the 51-year-old Tesla CEO with an aversion to exercise was at a bit of a disadvantage (a notion that was reinforced by his own mother).
Dana White asserted the two men are actually serious about making a fight come together, and it seems safe to assume we’d be treated to a spectacle that gives Mayweather vs. McGregor a run for its money if they actually agreed to make the theoretical matchup a reality.
There’s no way to know how things would actually unfold unless the showdown came to fruition, and while Zuckerberg’s MMA trainer declined to offer a concrete prediction, it sounds like he’s pretty confident in his client’s abilities based on what he had to say during a recent interview with Forbes.
The trainer in question is Khai Wu, a 27-year-old known as “The Shadow” who is currently under contract with the PFL. It’s unclear exactly how long he’s been working with Zuckerberg, but it is pretty clear he thinks the Meta CEO wouldn’t take the fight lightly based on what he had to say about his experiences with him:
“I can only speak on how hard he works. He works really hard…
The mindset here is important. I think a lot of people who are successful like him tend to just go , ‘I know it all,’ you know, but he’s still like a student—white belt—shows up, trains hard, puts in the effort, and like wants to learn, you know. He’s a student of the game.
I wouldn’t be surprised if he became an athlete or competed at a higher level in some sort of athletic sport. Because he really is a student of the game.”
The fact that Zuckerberg has a trainer in the first place already gives him a leg up on Musk—although the latter could theoretically link up with Andrew Tate if the litany of crimminal charges the controversial influencer is currently facing don’t get in the way.