Zuckerberg Trains With UFC Champion, Muscling Up For Musk: 'No Fugazi With Mark The Shark'

It seems like Meta Platforms Inc META CEO Mark Zuckerberg is taking the potential cage fight with Tesla Inc TSLA CEO Elon Musk pretty seriously.

What Happened: Zuckerberg has been training with Israel Adesanya, the current Middleweight UFC champion. After the workout, Adesanya posted a series of photos with the Meta CEO on the Threads app and captioned an Instagram post, “No fugazi with Mark The Shark.”

Adesanya, known for his 24-2-0 professional MMA career, has a string of victories against other top contenders including Anderson Silva and Kelvin Gastelum. He’s a triple threat — mixed martial artist, kickboxer and former boxer — with multiple championships in all three disciplines.

The unlikely partnership came as Musk gears up for the rumored cage fight.

The Tesla CEO has been spotted training with UFC legend Georges St. Pierre and MMA instructor John Danaher. Commenting on the challenging training session, Musk tweeted that it was a great honor but that he needed “a lot more training.”

Jorge Masdival, another prominent UFC figure, has also extended an offer to train Musk.

Read Also: Musk Vs. Zuckerberg: Benzinga Users Favor One Billionaire If Biggest Fight In ‘History Of The World’ Happens

The billionaire rivalry has been simmering for over half a decade, with disagreements spanning topics from artificial intelligence to rocket mishaps.

Musk and Zuckerberg have since not shied away from throwing barbs at each other. Their discord escalated further when they began to engage in a literal ‘di** measuring contest,’ initiated by Musk.

With both tech magnates having backgrounds in martial arts, the proposed cage match could well be a reality.

Musk, at a reported 6’1″ and weighing between 185 and 200 pounds, has early martial arts training in Brazilian jiu-jitsu (BJJ), karate, taekwondo and judo.

In contrast, Zuckerberg, reported at 5’7″ and weighing around 155 pounds, holds an extensive portfolio in BJJ. He won gold and silver medals in his first BJJ tournament, and has trained with five-time IBJJF black belt World Champion, Mikey Musumeci.

The billionaire's rivalry is also beginning to form another, deeper layer.

Zuckerberg’s latest venture, Threads, a social media site touted as the “Twitter Killer,” gained a staggering 70 million followers within a day of its launch, drawing the ire of Musk and his lawyers.

Accusations of unlawful misappropriation of Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property soon followed.

But the origin of their feud goes even further back, with roots in a disastrous SpaceX launch in 2016 that saw Zuckerberg’s satellite destroyed.

And it didn’t take long for their professional disagreements to descend into personal affronts.

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