Ladies and gentlemen, this is the maaaiiin event of the eeevening. In the red corner, fighting out of Boca Chica, Texas, Eeeeelon ‘the Execuuutioner’ MUUUSK! And his opponent, in the blue corner, fighting out of Palo Alto, California, Maaaark ‘The Madman’ ZUCKERBEEERG!
Sadly, we might never get the fight between Elon Musk of Twitter and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook. Musk has said that he would be ‘up for a cage fight’ with Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg then responded simply: ‘Send me location.’ The internet erupted. UFC legend Georges St-Pierre offered to train Musk while UFC heavyweight champion Jon Jones announced that he would be ‘Team Zuck’. Bookmakers started taking bets.
It might seem a bit embarrassing for a 52-year-old multi-billionaire to get pulled out of a fight by his mum
Alas, Musk’s mum has said it isn’t going to happen, the spoilsport. It might seem a bit embarrassing for a 52-year-old multi-billionaire to get pulled out of a fight by his mum but in fairness one of the best MMA fighters of all time, Khabib Nurmagomedov, retired in 2020 because he had promised his mother that he would.
What’s going on in the mega-rich nerd community? Brawny Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky challenged his peers to a bench-pressing contest, saying, somewhat menacingly: ‘I’ve been waiting for these physical battles in tech.’ Perhaps the trend is just a means of grabbing some good PR from male customers. But there does seem to be a new emphasis on physicality, for want of a better word, among the uber-wealthy. Take Jeff Bezos. Amazon’s founder was once a pasty schlub but transformed himself into a jacked man’s man with rippling muscles.
The wealthy love testosterone supplements, as Melissa Chen has written in The Spectator World. And why wouldn’t they, when the steep expense is a non-issue and the best doctors in the world are on hand to monitor their health? To some extent, their interest in being more manly needs no special explanation because most men would try to be more manly if they had access to the top trainers, the top nutritionists and great, er, supplements. Bezos bulking up and snagging himself a buxom celebrity girlfriend is not a billionaire thing. It’s a man thing.
But what about mixed martial arts in particular? I think to some extent one must credit – or blame – Joe Rogan. Rogan, and his gigantic podcast, illuminated how many men are really still teenage boys. Many men cling to a boyish assemblage of interests that span gadgets and technology to face punching. Both Zuckerberg and Musk have appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience and both retain a slightly gawky teenagerish image. Musk’s obsessions, cars and space rockets, are decidedly adolescent. While Zuckerberg no doubt wants to shed his reputation as the archetypal nerd (if not an actual robot).
There’s more to it than this, though. The uber-rich tend to be very driven, focused people (so are countless people who aren’t billionaires, of course, but that doesn’t make this less true). It’s not an improbable leap to transfer an obsession with technical and financial data to optimising workouts or the techniques of a jiu-jitsu bout. Of course, exercise also plays a powerful role in clearing the mind.
Yet I can’t help wondering if something a bit darker lurks beneath these physical pursuits. Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos etc are pursuing the increased technologisation of society. Zuckerberg has been developing the ‘metaverse’ – a sort of immersive virtual world that looks comically unappealing. Musk has been working on Neuralink – an attempt to build implantable brain-computer interfaces that will ‘improve the bandwidth between your cortex and your digital tertiary layer by many orders of magnitude’.
How do these tech bros feel about their dehumanising technologies? Musk has suggested that the Unabomber ‘might not have been wrong’ about the dangers of technologisation – and while Musk’s public pronouncements should be taken with a fistful of salt given his deep attention-seeking instincts, there might have been some amount of sincerity involved. Certainly, he has been very active in warning of the potential dangers of artificial intelligence.
Perhaps the appeal of lifting and martial arts has something to do with a desire to feel more human – maybe even atonement. Historically, some Christians have pursued ‘redemptive suffering’ through physical acts like self-flagellation. Could finding oneself with one’s face buried in a sweaty crotch as a man attempts to rip one’s leg off have some of the same appeal? Perhaps not. But even so, we deserve to see this fight. It’s the least that our sterile and machine-managed age deserves.
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