11th August 2023 Mumbai: UFC president Dana White has said he spoke to Italy’s culture minister about the prospect of staging a fight between Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg at the Colosseum in Rome.
Zuckerberg is the CEO of Meta, while Musk owns Twitter (recently rebranded to X) and runs Tesla and SpaceX, and the pair have gone back and forth on social media recently, expressing a desire to fight one another.
White was quick to state how keen he was to get involved, and it seems he has followed through, telling Mike Tyson on Wednesday (9 August) that he has spoken to Gennaro Sangiuliano’s team about the potential fight.
Meeting with Culture team in Italy .
“It’s real, it’s real, they do wanna fight. We were literally talking about the Colosseum for that fight,” White said. “I actually did have a meeting with the minister of culture’s team in Italy to actually have that fight in the Colosseum, if it would happen.
“It would be MMA (mixed martial arts). We’re talking. No steroids, no steroids allowed; these guys would be drug tested. Zuckerberg takes this s*** very seriously. He is a huge UFC fan, he trains. He’s an MMA fan, I should say. Elon grew up doing judo, he’s a legit judo guy.
One of the best and biggest fight if happened!
“This is one of those fights that, if we did do that, I would build a killer undercard with tons of great fights and them in the main event. But think about how big that fight is! Two of the richest, most powerful guys in the f***ing world are gonna fight on the biggest stage ever.
“Everybody would [pay for it]! Who doesn’t wanna see that fight? That’s the kind of fight your grandmother would watch. [Donald] Trump would have to fight [Vladimir] Putin for a fight to be bigger than that.”
Between 52 & 39
White also predicted that a bout between Musk, 52, and Zuckerberg, 39, would make $1billion in revenue.
Zuckerberg has been pictured training with UFC champions Israel Adesanya and Alexander Volkanovski in recent months, while Musk asked for the help of UFC legend Georges St-Pierre ahead of a potential training camp.
ASC Priya