Musk v Zuckerberg: why so many celebrities crave the the brutal honesty of a cage fight | Ben Fowlkes

IIt’s testament to how strange our shared reality has become that two of the richest and most powerful men in the world can claim their willingness to fight each other in a “cage fight” and are immediately taken seriously.

It was enough for Elon Musk to tweet the proposal, to which Mark Zuckerberg quickly agreed. The prospect of a fight eclipsed their argument over starting Zuckerberg’s Twitter competitor Threads. Both reportedly contacted Ultimate Fighting Championship President Dana White to organize the fight. Always the hyperbolic carnival hooter, White recently wore a T-shirt advertising the game, which he says could be “the greatest fight ever in the history of the world.”

It’s odd to say that about two middle-aged men who aren’t professional fighters by any reasonable definition of the term. But what if it’s true? What if the sheer power of their collective fame was enough to convince millions of people to pay to watch them fight? It’s frighteningly plausible that there are more people interested in watching two unskilled billionaires fight in a cage than there are people willing to pay to watch even the best athletes in what is still a largely niche sport see.

It’s probably a depressing thought when you’re one of those athletes who have dedicated their entire lives to sport. But it says something about the role that martial arts has come to play in our culture. Rather than being reserved for the true obsessives who have put in the time and work to justify an appearance on television, they’ve become a fast testing ground for celebrities looking to capitalize on fame or perhaps just want to bolster their public image to soften to be of great use.

Rich men looking for a semblance of street toughness credibility via a martial arts connection are nothing new. The bare-knuckle era of the London prize ring in the 18th and early 19th centuries – in many ways the first professional fighting scene and one that framed all of our current models – was essentially embraced by English nobility, many of whom attempted it in the “male art” of boxing in James Figg’s London amphitheater just as Silicon Valley tech brothers now drop by overpriced gyms for private jiu-jitsu classes.

While the dirty work of actually fighting usually falls to those born into far less privileged backgrounds, the rich and famous have often loved engaging in the fighting game – and sometimes even convincing themselves or others that they were good are on it. Ernest Hemingway famously deluded himself about his own boxing abilities, to the point that champion boxer Jack Dempsey refused to fight with him, as he obligingly did with other expat writers in Paris.

So maybe it shouldn’t surprise us to see the current age of the influencer fighter. People like Jake Paul and KSI have managed to transform celebrity boxing from a one-off oddity into an all-day personal brand. There are several good reasons why this works in martial arts in a way that would never work in other professional sports. First, fighting is all relative. You don’t have to be a great fighter to win fights. You simply have to be a better fighter than the opponent you chose.

It’s also an area where popularity – or notoriety – can be monetized easily and almost instantly. You don’t have to convince a team or league to put you on the payroll and make you part of their operations. You don’t even have to prove yourself. It’s enough to just be known and have the people who care about you, be it positive or negative.

But perhaps most importantly, fighting promises a certain brutal honesty that is difficult to achieve in most other sectors of our society. Fighting is sport without metaphor, a reduced and intimate test of physical and emotional strength that offers opportunities for personal glory but also intense humiliation.

When it comes to people like Musk and Zuckerberg getting involved, that’s appealing because we live in a society dominated by mega-rich titans who, we’re increasingly beginning to suspect, may not be as smart or as great as they are have fooled us into believing. Their wealth and power seem to isolate them from so many aspects of human experience. But cage them up with another human who wants to hurt them? Then, like the rest of us, they’re just another sack of meat, vulnerable to having their fear and frailty exposed on live television.

It’s certainly not that we think there’s any chance it’s a good display of combat or athletics (although, to be fair, Zuckerberg’s intermediate-level jiu-jitsu would be more than enough to easily defeat Musk defeating which is only one of the reasons for the fight will almost certainly never happen). If we’re interested, it’s more because we think something real, instinctive, and human could be happening to them, at least here. And despite everything, we don’t want to miss out on that. Because who knows if we’ll ever get another chance to see a billionaire bleed?

• Ben Fowlkes is a sportswriter who has covered martial arts in USA Today, Sports Illustrated and The Athletic since 2016