Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg might be talking a good game right now about actually fighting each other, but Matt Brown has serious doubts this odd fantasy matchmaking ever becomes reality.
The bizarre pairing came together after the billionaire owner of Twitter challenged the billionaire founder of Facebook and things spiraled out of control from there. UFC president Dana White has even gotten involved after talking to both Musk and Zuckerberg and now even he’s convinced this proposed fight could not only happen but it would be one of the biggest combat sports events in history.
For all the talk about the fight, Brown can’t help but scoff at the idea that Musk and Zuckerberg would actually set foot in a cage and throw punches at each other, especially in a promotion as notable as the UFC.
“They’re not going to f****** fight,” Brown said on the new episode of The Fighter vs. The Writer.
These motherf****** ain’t going to fight. What are you talking about? Everybody talks that s***. We’re talking about them right now. Twitter’s talking about them. Everybody’s forgetting about all the f****** garbage bulls*** that they’ve done in their lives. I don’t even know what they’ve done, but I know they’ve got a lot of haters. Like [Elon says] ‘why don’t you quit talking s*** about me buying Twitter cause I’m going to go cage fight’ and everybody is like OK, no problem, bro! That’s how these motherf****** operate.
“It’s a P.R. f****** scandal. I’m asking the MMA community to be more intelligent than this. Can we see through this?”
Now Brown admits if the fight actually came to fruition, he would likely watch just because it would attract a massive audience, but he still doubts that Musk and Zuckerberg would actually go through with it.
“If they do [fight], yes, I’ll f****** watch it, you’ll watch it, we’ll all watch it and you know we’re going to vomit when we watch it,” Brown said. “Like what the f*** did I just watch? Why did I stay up until f****** midnight watching this? We’re going to hate ourselves for it.”
White has argued that he doesn’t consider the matchup to be a “gimmick fight” despite the fact that neither one has any real background in combat sports outside Zuckerberg taking up Brazilian jiu-jitsu in recent months and Musk training in some martial arts when he was younger. That’s a far cry from UFC level talent — or any real MMA talent — even when compared to the most novice athletes who have ever competed in the UFC.
Perhaps the name at the top of that list would be ex-WWE superstar and current AEW wrestler C.M. Punk (real name Phil Brooks), who made an ill fated attempt at crossing over to the UFC but he was soundly defeated in a pair of fights against Mickey Gall and Mike Jackson before returning to professional wrestling. Brown anticipates as bad as Punk looked in his two UFC fights that he would still seem like a future world champion compared to the skills that Musk and Zuckerberg would likely display.
“When we watched CM Punk lose to Mike Jackson — it was one thing to lose to Mickey Gall because we didn’t really know much about him before but come to find out he’s a legit f****** fighter, he’s a really good fighter,” Brown explained. “I’ve trained with him since, we’re good fights, he’s a really, really good fighter.
“But Mike Jackson — CM Punk loses to Mike Jackson, did anybody walk away from that going ‘I’m glad I watched that.’ Now imagine two guys that are not even as good as CM Punk. Like CM Punk would probably beat both of them. I don’t get the interest in seeing these guys fight.”
Brown can’t also help but wonder if promoting Musk vs. Zuckerberg alongside a card filled with legitimate UFC fighters doesn’t somehow damage the promotion’s brand.
Unlike street fighters like Kimbo Slice or Sean Gannon who got a shot in the UFC without much high level MMA experience, or even a boxer like James Toney, who really had no business sharing the cage with Randy Couture, Brown argues that in every previous example those bouts all involved at least one legitimate fighter as well.
Brown also points out that Gannon, Kimbo and especially Toney all had some kind of background in fighting but the same certainly can’t be said about Musk or Zuckerberg.
“With these guys, it’s literally just that gimmick fight,” Brown said. “It’s only that. There’s no upside of either of these guys as fighters beyond that. That’s where to me, it diminishes the [UFC] brand a little bit because it’s like if we do it now, are you going to keep doing it? Do you keep doing it again and again and again?
“All those guys you mentioned again, they were sort of gimmicky fights but I don’t see those as pure gimmick fights because they were fighting real fighters on the other side and they did have a chance.”
One other aspect of the potential matchup that Brown is quick to criticize comes down to the idea that Musk and Zuckerberg would both earn a certain level of respect by just setting foot in the octagon to do battle against each other.
While Brown respects that perhaps both Musk and Zuckerberg are martial arts enthusiasts, that’s a far cry from believing either of them automatically deserves a pat on the back for actually fighting.
“What I don’t want to hear from these people is ‘oh I respect anybody who walks in that cage.’ That is a terrible thing to say,” Brown said. “Because I have met some of the stupidest motherf****** ever that have stepped foot in a cage that were not ready to step foot in a cage. I was one of them as a matter of fact.
“I was that guy when I first started. My first fight, I was coked out of my mind and never trained a day in my life. I was that stupid motherf*****. Fortunately, it worked out for me. For 99.9 percent, it’s not working out so don’t tell me you respect anybody who walks in the cage. When people say that, it drives me up the f****** wall.”
Listen to new episodes of The Fighter vs. The Writer every Tuesday with audio only versions of the podcast available on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio and Stitcher
