Musk + Zuckerberg, openly challenged to a fight! What on earth are these top billionaires risking their lives for?

If you lose a fight, you will be hospitalized, and if you win, you will go to jail.

But in the past two days, Musk and Zuckerberg's "fight" has made the whole world "happy to see" . Media from all over the world are also following the developments, and the "war" is about to break out.

In order to avoid you not knowing who these two people are, let me give you a brief introduction below.

Elon Musk, founder of Tesla and SpaceX, acquired Twitter, is a pioneer in new energy vehicles, a Mars immigrant explorer, and the world's richest man in 2023.

Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, is the richest person born in the 1980s in the world. His personal assets exceeded those of Li Ka-shing at the age of 31 and those of Warren Buffett at the age of 36.

The two business tycoons have a combined net worth of more than $340 billion, so why are they suddenly planning to have an MMA fight in the octagon?

01

Why did the billionaire tycoon invite someone to a fight?

This matter has to start with the competition between the two in the business field .

Twitter belongs to Musk, Facebook belongs to Zuckerberg, and now Facebook has been renamed "Meta". Both platforms are social media giants, and they are inherently competitive and prone to competing with each other.

Recently, there was news that Meta was going to launch a new app called "Treads", a blatant competitor to Twitter. Even in an internal meeting, Meta's chief product officer told employees that users needed a "robust" Twitter. Everyone knows what he meant by that, Twitter is not stable.

Moreover, when Zuckerberg was interviewed, he said, "I thought there were 1 billion people using Twitter." His words implied that Twitter had few users.

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Musk, who is always very active on social media, responded in a sarcastic tone: "I'm sure the Earth can't wait to be controlled by Zuckerberg." So some netizens added fuel to the fire: "Musk, you better be careful, Zuckerberg is practicing jiu-jitsu."

Musk couldn't sit still after hearing this and said: Let's start the fight in the octagon in Las Vegas!

Musk's "fight" scene

Zuckerberg didn't back down at all and accepted the challenge directly.

Zuckerberg responded on his personal social media account: "Send me the address"

When this happened, even the UFC president became excited.

With all the excitement, I believe many people are still confused: What is MMA? What is UFC? What are the differences between mixed martial arts, boxing, jiu-jitsu, Muay Thai, and Sanda?

This time I understand it clearly.

02 Boxing

In boxing, athletes wear gloves on both hands and use various punches and footwork to hit the opponent. Athletes can only use fists to hit the opponent above the waist, and are prohibited from hitting the back of the head, kicking, and elbowing. Among the sports mentioned above, boxing is the only combat sport that requires wearing shoes .

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Although boxing can only use fists, the real boxing masters have their skills in their feet. Only with flexible and agile steps and coordinated power of waist and hips can they punch with penetrating power .

The famous boxing champions Ali and Tyson in the early years, the current Mexican boxing champion Alvarez, the Ukrainian boxing champion Lomachenko, the Chinese boxing champions Zou Shiming and Zhang Zhilei, they are all outstanding boxers.

You can search for their training videos online and you will find that they often jump rope or "jump back and forth" in a row of grids on the ground. This is practicing steps in different ways.

03 Sanda

In boxing, you can only use your fists, not your feet; but in Sanda, you can use not only your fists, but also your feet . To attack the side of the opponent, you can use a whip kick and a sweep kick; to attack the front of the opponent, you can use a side kick and a front kick.

Unlike boxing, Sanda allows the use of legs. Image source: Wikipedia

04 Muay Thai

Muay Thai is Thailand's traditional fighting sport. Compared with boxing and Sanda, Muay Thai has two more lethal attacking parts - elbows and knees .

We can knock on our elbows with our hands. The pain here is not obvious, but there is a bulge that is extremely hard.

When a well-trained Muay Thai fighter uses his full strength to strike with his elbow, the elbow can be as powerful as a knife and can produce an extremely strong impact force, causing serious damage to the opponent's brow bone and nose bridge.

But elbow strikes also have disadvantages. The attack distance is too short and is only suitable for close combat. If the distance is far, use fists and feet. If the distance is farther, you need to adjust the distance with steps.

Therefore, no one trick is always effective. The best approach is to use different tricks at different distances.

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05 Jujutsu

Next, let's talk about Jiu-Jitsu. The boxing, Sanda and Muay Thai mentioned above are all "standing fighting", while Jiu-Jitsu is "ground grappling", which includes a lot of joint techniques and strangulation techniques . When two people hug each other and fall to the ground, they should use joint lock techniques to make the other party surrender; or strangle the opponent's neck like a snake, blocking the opponent's artery blood supply, making the opponent lose consciousness and collapse on the ground. Like "naked choke" and "guillotine", they are all strangulation techniques in Jiu-Jitsu.

The phrase "twisting into a ball" is very vivid. The picture is copyrighted by the library, and reprinting it may cause copyright disputes.

Zuckerberg has the habit of practicing Jiu-Jitsu and has obtained a blue belt. Jiu-Jitsu is divided into 7 levels, namely white belt, blue belt, purple belt, brown belt, first black belt, second black belt and third black belt. The blue belt is the second one, which means that Zuckerberg has entered the door and is no longer a beginner.

From a technical perspective, Zuckerberg is better than Musk, because Musk said he doesn't have the habit of exercising. However, Musk is tall and strong, and is obviously several weight classes higher than Zuckerberg. Isn't there a saying? "In the face of absolute power, skills are worthless", so it's hard to say who is better between the two.

06 Mixed Martial Arts

Finally, we are talking about MMA, the "big fight". MMA is the abbreviation of Mixed Martial Arts, which is called comprehensive fighting in Chinese. If we talk about the most versatile fighting type, MMA is undoubtedly the best. It combines the skills of almost all fighting techniques , such as boxing, Sanda, Muay Thai, Jiu-Jitsu, etc. You can see their shadows in MMA competitions. In MMA competitions, punches, kicks, elbows, knees, standing confrontations and ground confrontations are all allowed. The rules of MMA are more free and more entertaining.

The venue for MMA competitions is the octagonal cage, an octagonal ring surrounded by steel wires. It looks more like a "battle of trapped beasts", and the enthusiasm of the audience is immediately ignited by this hormonal atmosphere.

In October 2021, UFC was held. When Chinese mixed martial arts athlete Li Jingliang fought against the Swedish "Wolf King" Chimaev, Chimaev finally used the "naked choke" to make Li Jingliang fall to the ground.

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There are 2 knowledge points here:

1. In an MMA match, if the opponent feels unbearable pain, or is running out of will and strength, he can tap his opponent or the ground to indicate, "I can't do it anymore, I give up, let go." However, in the match between Li Jingliang and Chimayev, he was hit by numerous heavy punches on the head and then choked. He did not tap his opponent to indicate until the last moment. The referee stopped the match after judging that Li Jingliang had lost consciousness. He had the spirit of "I would rather die on the battlefield than kneel down and beg for mercy", and he was still honorable despite his defeat.

2. Just now a new abbreviation popped up - UFC. What is its relationship with MMA? MMA is the sport of mixed martial arts, and UFC is the name of the highest competition of mixed martial arts, the Ultimate Fighting Championship. It is like if you practice table tennis and finally participate in the World Table Tennis Championships, it proves that you are very good at table tennis.

UFC is for professional MMA athletes only. Musk and Zuckerberg cannot fight in UFC, but the current news is that they will use the UFC venue in Las Vegas.

When the "Octagon Cage Showdown" came out, although many netizens were amused, it scared Musk's old mother. After all, Musk is 52 years old and has no exercise habits. What if he gets hurt?

So Musk's mother stepped in to mediate.

However, persuading the fight did not seem to work. On June 24, Musk said in an interview that if the game was approaching, he would start training. At present, Musk and Zuckerberg seem to be doing emergency training for the game.

On June 28, Musk was training with Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu black belt Lex Friedman.

We don't know whether the match will go smoothly or who will win, but through this "fight", more people will know about MMA, which will be very helpful in promoting this sport. Learning to fight will not make people violent, but will make them stronger, more courageous and more restrained.

Author: Chen Qiqi Popular Science Creator

Reviewer: Feng Qiang, Deputy Director of the National Physical Fitness and Scientific Fitness Research Center, Institute of Sports Science, General Administration of Sport of China

Reviewer: Ma Yong, Professor of Wuhan Institute of Physical Education

Planning Editor: Xu Lai

Editor-in-charge: Cui Yinghao