UFC President Dana White confirmed the world really was this close to seeing Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk duke it out at the Colosseum in Rome.
Although many thought the aborted cage match was just a social media stunt, during an appearance on Monday’s Tucker Carlson Show White told his host, “That was real. I was in the middle of it, and I had a blast doing the negotiations with that thing.”
In June 2023, Musk challenged tech billionaire rival Zuckerberg to a cage match on social media, leading the Facebook founder to reach out to his friend White to see if the offer was real, The New York Times reported.
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Zuckerberg accepted, and over the next two months they teased the match-up. Las Vegas seemed to be the preferred location, until Musk wrote on social media, “Some chance fight happens in Colosseum.” Five weeks later, he wrote that Italy’s prime minister and minister of culture had agreed on “an epic location,” with ancient Rome filling the camera frame.
But a few days later, Zuckerberg called off the whole thing, writing in a post on Threads that Musk wasn’t “serious” about a real date or an official event. Musk confirmed the challenge had originally been a joke but blamed Zuckerberg for the fight falling through.
The Ministry of Culture also told the Italian daily Corriere della Serra it hadn’t offered up the Colosseum as a venue.
But on Monday, White told Carlson he was “literally doing conference calls with the government in Italy to do this thing in the Colosseum in Rome. For the right number, the Colosseum was going to let us do that fight there.”
White said he was on the phone with both Musk and Zuckerberg for an hour every night trying to work out where the fight would be, what weight class it would be, and what moves would be allowed. He and Zuckerberg were already on friendly terms after Zuckerberg had reached out and invited him to his house in Lake Tahoe, he said.
As part of a tech bro glow-up, Zuckerberg had spent the past two years bulking up and training in martial arts, and was reportedly 70 pounds heavier than Musk, who is 13 years his senior, the Times reported.
Musk, however, hated sports and admitted to Zuckerberg he hadn’t really been practicing. He also thought he might need surgery on his neck and upper back, CNBC reported.
“Eventually, it started to fall apart, but while it lasted it was fun,” White said. “And through that Mark and I became even closer.”
Almost a year later, right after White finished endorsing President Donald Trump at the Republican National Convention, Zuckerberg called him and asked him to serve on the board of Meta, he said.
