Would you want to see Mark Zuckerberg fighting Elon Musk in an octagonal steel cage where the rules are no biting or scratching? (That’s it; those are the rules). My instinctive reaction would be absodoodly. Just the idea of two people richer than Croesus making complete fools of themselves in front of the entire universe is completely irresistible.

The reason this is an issue is that The Wall Street Journal recently featured a piece about A-list celebrities and titans of industry entering Brazilian jiu-jitsu tournaments after intensive training. The people named were Tom Hardy, Ashton Kutcher, Mario Lopez and Mark Zuckerberg, who was shown (can you imagine?) crushing his opponent. Elon Musk was recently photographed wearing a jiu-jitsu white belt.

Well, this started a whole thing, apparently. “I’m up for a cage match if he is lol,” Musk tweeted recently. “Send me location,” Zuck replied via Instagram Stories. “If this is for real, I’ll do it,” Musk volleyed back.

So, now we wait.

There is some real bitterness between the two billionaires, particularly since Meta’s decision to launch a kind of rival to Twitter (Musk-owned) via Instagram (Zuckerberg-owned). At the launch of the new product, Meta’s chief product officer, Chris Cox, said it was inspired by users who want “a sanely run” social media platform, which was of course a reference to the chaos at Twitter since Musk’s takeover. Ouch!

In a column on the issue, The Wall Street Journal’s sports columnist, Jason Gay, writes that the prospect of a fight was enough to send the tech media into a frenzy, with the sports world not far behind. Ultimate Fighting Championship (a mixed martial arts promotion company) representative Dana White, showing admirable restraint, announced that a Zuckerberg-Musk fight “would be the biggest fight ever in the history of the world”.

“If you think this sounds ridiculous, welcome to the sport of fighting, where even the legit stuff comes with a side order of crazy. There’s no room in the combat trade for the mild, the sheepish, the sceptical. If the money’s right, no proposal is too silly to be considered,” Gay writes.

You have to ask, though, would you really want to see a fight like this?  It would probably start with high expectations and end with everybody feeling embarrassed for everyone else when both sides end up flailing wildly and missing frequently, which is how most street fights end up.

Gay says the fight “would look like a fight for four seconds and then it would look like two rich Dads slowly grappling on the deck of a superyacht for the last bottle of sparkling Voss”.

One assumes money is not the issue for these two. They are already both so rich that no amount of money could be a motivator. So, what is?

What’s at stake is the ethos of tech. It would be the pinnacle of tech bro-ism: two people who consider themselves the centre of the universe in a wild assertion of their unchallenged egos. I’m not sure about you, but I’ve just kinda had it with tech bro-ism.

It makes you long for the days when duels were fought over issues of honour, like cowardice, being ungentlemanly, or passing the port the wrong way. Nowadays, ego is more important than honour. At least Musk has the decency to be funny about it; he tweeted that he has a great move called “The Walrus” where he just lies on top of you.

But honestly, it does make you wonder why we entrust our hard-earned cash to these blokey blokes. DM