Musk vs Zuckerberg: UFC president meets Italy’s culture minister to discuss fight at Colosseum

Dana White suggested he spoke to Gennaro Sangiuliano about a potential cage fight between the tech titans

Alex Pattle
Combat Sports Correspondent
Thursday 10 August 2023 07:53 EDT
Comments
Twitter to X: Why Elon Musk rebranded the social networking platform

Your support helps us to tell the story

From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.

At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story.

The Independent is trusted by Americans across the entire political spectrum. And unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock Americans out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. We believe quality journalism should be available to everyone, paid for by those who can afford it.

Your support makes all the difference.

UFC president Dana White has said he spoke to Italy’s culture minister about the prospect of staging a fight between Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg at the Colosseum in Rome.

Zuckerberg is the CEO of Meta, while Musk owns Twitter (recently rebranded to X) and runs Tesla and SpaceX, and the pair have gone back and forth on social media recently, expressing a desire to fight one another.

White was quick to state how keen he was to get involved, and it seems he has followed through, telling Mike Tyson on Wednesday (9 August) that he has spoken to Gennaro Sangiuliano’s team about the potential fight.

“It’s real, it’s real, they do wanna fight. We were literally talking about the Colosseum for that fight,” White said. “I actually did have a meeting with the minister of culture’s team in Italy to actually have that fight in the Colosseum, if it would happen.

“It would be MMA (mixed martial arts). We’re talking. No steroids, no steroids allowed; these guys would be drug tested. Zuckerberg takes this s*** very seriously. He is a huge UFC fan, he trains. He’s an MMA fan, I should say. Elon grew up doing judo, he’s a legit judo guy.

“This is one of those fights that, if we did do that, I would build a killer undercard with tons of great fights and them in the main event. But think about how big that fight is! Two of the richest, most powerful guys in the f***ing world are gonna fight on the biggest stage ever.

“Everybody would [pay for it]! Who doesn’t wanna see that fight? That’s the kind of fight your grandmother would watch. [Donald] Trump would have to fight [Vladimir] Putin for a fight to be bigger than that.”

White also predicted that a bout between Musk, 52, and Zuckerberg, 39, would make $1billion in revenue.

Zuckerberg has been pictured training with UFC champions Israel Adesanya and Alexander Volkanovski in recent months, while Musk asked for the help of UFC legend Georges St-Pierre ahead of a potential training camp.

Join our commenting forum

Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies

Comments

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged inPlease refresh your browser to be logged in