Two of the biggest names in tech, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, have been engaging in a social media feud that has resulted in rumors of a potential cage fight.

Both billionaires are gearing up for an MMA fight at an unconfirmed location and on a to-be-decided date.

Musk signaled his interest in the match on Twitter a few days ago, and Zuckerberg confirmed that he was in through Instagram.

However, there is a question as to whether this match is even going to happen despite Dana White’s assertion that both guys are absolutely dead serious.

The shared plea for attention could be a means of distracting from news they might want to bury.

Just before the cage fight news broke, Meta announced that it would cut off access to news on Facebook and Instagram in Canada following the passage of a law that requires such tech companies to compensate domestic media outlets when linking to their content.

Meanwhile, Musk’s reputation has plunged in the last year, and even Tesla’s reputation has been affected by his behavior.

But entertaining a fight like this also seems to be a reflection of Musk’s and Zuckerberg’s sheer vanity.

The younger generation of MMA fans, in particular, are willing to fanboy for billionaires, said Nate Wilcox, the owner of Bloody Elbow, a news site that covers MMA and other combat sports.

Musk has done stunts like this before to successfully win media attention, like smoking weed on Joe Rogan’s show or naming his dog the CEO of Twitter.

And Zuckerberg is the kind of guy who reportedly cuts his hair to look like Augustus Caesar.

This entire idea might sound like a worrying fever dream, but it is, in fact, real, and the Musk vs. Zuckerberg faceoff has somewhat of a history.

What set the stage for their beef was a SpaceX rocket carrying a Facebook-owned satellite in 2016.

The launch failed, and the satellite was destroyed, which the company now known as Meta had been planning to use to provide internet service in parts of Africa.

While the two men aren’t exactly friends, the promised Musk-Zuckerberg fight is actually about the competition of two similar businesses, which ramped up after Musk entered the social media arena last year by (reluctantly) buying Twitter.

Since then, Twitter’s declining stability, its ploys to charge users for features like identity-verifying blue check marks, and increasingly visible right-wing vitriol and hate speech have been the subject of nonstop complaining and mockery.

It’s true that Meta is the much bigger company, with a market cap of almost $747 billion and 3.8 billion monthly active users across all of its apps.

In contrast, Twitter’s market cap was around $41 billion before Musk took it private, and had around 368 million monthly active users in 2022.

But the rhetoric is also classic Elon, positioning himself as the champion of the everyman who promises to create an egalitarian, free-speech town square standing up against tyrannical monarchs.

It’s difficult to predict whether Musk or Zuckerberg would emerge victorious.

In Zuckerberg’s case, the closest he’s come to fighting is the lowest level of amateur competition in jiu-jitsu, in which he has earned a white belt.

That might give him a slight edge over Musk, who seemingly has never done anything of the sort.

Zuckerberg is also younger by 12 years, suggesting that he might be more agile.

However, Musk is larger in size, and that can prove a big advantage in MMA.

Putting money on either of them is a risky proposition.

And while neither of them likely has the skill to knock the other out, it could still be an ugly fight, reminiscent of some celebrity boxing matches in the early 2000s.

If Musk and Zuckerberg duke it out under the UFC, it would have to be regulated, which would likely include safety requirements such as headgear that would put an upper bound on how dangerous it could be.

The real question is why two billionaires known for their intellectual property would throw fists.

We’re all immersed in the hamster wheel of the attention economy, and the owners of two popular social media platforms know this.

Tech billionaires have received the treatment of modern-day gods for decades now; their net worth is determined not just by the technologies they purport to disrupt but also how cool, savvy, and genius their audience perceives them to be.

Clout is a considerable asset, especially for CEOs and founders hustling in the mercurial waters of the tech industry.

Musk and Zuckerberg know this.

When the attention is on them and they go viral, that usually makes them richer and more influential.