Elon Musk has stated once again that he’s ready to physically fight Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg – roughly one year after their plans to face off in a “cage match” fell apart.
The tech billionaire reignited his long-simmering rivalry with Zuckerberg during a trip to Capitol Hill on Wednesday. The Tesla CEO traveled to Washington to attend Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to Congress.
“I’ll fight Zuckerberg any place, any time, any rules,” Musk told a reporter when asked about a potential match.
Zuckerberg dismissed Musk’s remarks, writing in a Threads post: “Are we really doing this again?”
The possibility of an actual brawl between Musk and Zuckerberg dates back to last June. At the time, the two billionaires were trading verbal blows after Zuckerberg announced the launch of Threads, a social media site that directly competes with Elon Musk’s X.
Musk – who once posted a photo of himself squaring off against a sumo wrestler – responded by challenging Zuckerberg to a cage match.
Zuckerberg, a mixed martial arts fanatic and amateur Brazilian jiu-jitsu practitioner, accepted the challenge, telling Musk “send me location.”
Negotiations on holding a charity match appeared to be fairly advanced, with Musk declaring at one point that the event would be live-streamed on X.
Podcaster and AI researcher Lex Fridman, a Brazilian jiujitsu black belt, tweeted photos of himself training with Musk ahead of the bout.
However, the heavily anticipated cage match collapsed by last August, when Musk posted that he may need surgery to fix a back injury he suffered during his showdown with the sumo wrestler eight years earlier.
Zuckerberg eventually got fed up with the delays, stating that “we can all agree Elon isn’t serous and it’s time to move on.”
The Instagram and Facebook chief said he floated a specific date for the match and that UFC President Dana White had offered to make it a “legit competition” to no avail.
“Elon won’t confirm a date, then says he needs surgery, and now asks to do a practice round in my backyard instead,” Zuckerberg wrote last Aug. 13. “If Elon ever gets serious about a real date and official event, he knows how to reach me.”
Last year, the Wall Street Journal reported that Musk and Zuckerberg had engaged in a “simmering feud for years” behind the scenes that has occasionally spilled out in public.
