Battle between rich nerds canceled after one nerd refuses to take it "seriously"

If there’s one thing about the rich assholes of today that’s an improvement on the rich assholes of the past, it’s that, in the old days, they used to force us to fight to the death for their pleasure. Now they just fight each other in a pathetic display of the kind of tough manliness that only too-much-money can buy… or at least that was the idea, as proposed by Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg back in June. Unfortunately, the most embarrassing fight in the history of fights will no longer be happening, as Zuckerberg has backed down from his plans to fight Elon Musk on the grounds that Musk clearly wasn’t taking it “seriously.”

This all started when Musk first heard rumors about Zuckerberg’s Meta launching a Twitter competitor (which we now know as Threads, a terrible alternative to a terrible original), with Musk saying he was “up for a cage match.” Zuckerberg, who apparently now does jiu-jitsu, did some dopey tough guy shit, and both of them started to apparently take the whole thing seriously (even Musk, even if it was under his usual layers and layers of “please like me” ironic detachment).

We didn’t hear much about it after that, but when Threads launched in July and quickly racked up a ton of downloads, Musk threatened legal action against Meta for “systematic, willful, and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property.” Musk also tweeted “competition is fine, cheating is not,” and he later challenged Zuckerberg to—heavy sigh, holding back the vomit—a “literal dick measuring contest.” Some people out there live paycheck-to-paycheck and are going to have their jobs replaced by artificial intelligence someday, but sure, let’s give all of our money to these idiots.

That contest never happened, thank the lord, but Musk recently tweeted some crazy shit implying that the fight would be happening at the Colosseum in Rome, and that his and Zuckerberg’s “foundations” would manage the fight rather than UFC. That’s not what Zuckerberg wanted, though, because he apparently thought they could make this a legitimate charity competition instead of… you know, some idiotic posturing from a pair of billionaires who are insecure in their masculinity.

As reported by The Hollywood Reporter, Zuckerberg posted on his Instagram story that “it’s time to move on” because Musk “isn’t serious” about this, explaining that he offered a real date and had UFC boss Dana White on board “to make this a legit competition for charity,” but Musk just keeps coming up with excuses to postpone it or to do something else. Zuckerberg ended his post by saying, “if Elon ever gets serious about a real date and official event, he knows how to reach me,” but he’s otherwise going to “move on” and “focus on competing with people who take the sport seriously.”

That last bit is what kills what would’ve been an easy win for Zuckerberg, unfortunately, because he should’ve just left it at “I would’ve really done it but he doesn’t want to.” Equating himself with “people who take the sport seriously” just makes us picture Jesse Eisenberg saying something like that in The Social Network, which would’ve been very funny. Also, we’re now fully descending into “plot point on Friends” territory, since this is pretty much exactly what happened with Jon Favreau’s character on the show—he was a rich guy who got really into UFC and kept getting destroyed by real fighters.

So this is all pretty embarrassing. Nobody wins here, least of all us.