MMA fighter Matt Brown criticizes the idea of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg facing off in a UFC match, calling it a “P.R. scandal” and doubting it will ever happen.
Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg have been talking about fighting each other, but Matt Brown doubts that this fantasy matchup will ever become a reality. The bizarre pairing materialized 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 he’s convinced that the proposed fight could not only happen but also become one of the biggest combat sports events in history.
However, 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?”
Brown admits that if the fight were to happen, he would likely watch it due to the massive audience it would attract, 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.
Brown can’t help but wonder if promoting Musk vs. Zuckerberg alongside a card filled with legitimate UFC fighters doesn’t somehow damage the promotion’s brand. He argues that in previous examples of 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 had no business sharing the cage with Randy Couture, those bouts all involved at least one legitimate fighter. Brown 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?”