Dana White believes a potential fight between Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk could would easily be the most lucrative bout in sports history.
In case you somehow missed it, over the summer, Zuckerberg and Musk — the two business magnates in charge of Facebook and Twitter respectively — decided they would be interested in fighting one another after Zuckerberg revealed Threads as an alternative to Twitter. Talk quickly turned to the two settling the score in the UFC, and ever the businessman himself, UFC President Dana White jumped at the chance to promote such a spectacle. And while talk on the possible matchup has cooled in recent weeks, White says that he is still working on making the fight happen.
“It’s real,” White said on the Hotboxin’ with Mike Tyson podcast. “They do want to fight. It’s real… It’s funny because we were talking about the Coliseum for that fight and I actually did have a meeting with the Minister of Culture’s team in Italy to actually hold that fight in the Colosseum if it would happen. We’re talking.”
White added that should it happen, the two billionaires would be drug tested for the bout as well, just like a real UFC fight. And while the fight certainly won’t be high level, White still thinks the matchup could be competitive. Zuckerberg, 38, is a big fan of MMA and is a blue belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu, even competing in some grappling tournaments recently. In contrast, Musk, 52, recently spent some time training with Georges St-Pierre and also has a background in judo.
“Zuckerberg takes this s*** very seriously,” White said. “He is a huge UFC fan. He trains. He’s an MMA fan… But Elon grew up doing judo. He’s a legit judo guy.”
In the age of influencer boxing, billionaire cage fights may just be the logical next step in fight promotion. And for Dana White and the UFC, the appeal is obvious: boatloads of money and press. In fact, White believes that should the fight come to pass, it would put any other fight before it to shame in terms of money.
“It’s one of those fights that if we did do that, I would build a killer undercard with tons of great fights, and then you’d have the main event,” White said. “Think about how big that fight is: two of the richest, most powerful guys in the f****** world are going to fight on the biggest stage ever. Everybody would [pay for it]! Who the f*** doesn’t want to see that fight? Who doesn’t want to see that fight? Everybody would watch it. That’s the kind of fight your f****** grandmother would watch. It’s a huge — [Donald] Trump would have to fight [Joe] Biden for a fight to be bigger than that.
“I think this thing does a billion dollars in revenue. A billion dollars. The biggest fight of all time was Conor [McGregor] and Floyd [Mayweather] which did four-point-something million pay-per-view buys, and the second-biggest one was Floyd and Manny [Pacquiao] which was literally right behind it.”