Looks like Elon Musk's belated 40th birthday present to Mark Zuckerberg is reviving that bizarre cage match bet (2024)

Musk was responding to a satirical news story about a hypothetical face-off between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump when he mentioned his own proposed battle with Zuckerberg.

Musk challenged Zuckerberg to a fight in June amid speculation that Meta would launch a rival to his social media platform, previously known as Twitter. Zuckerberg would eventually launch his text-based social media platform, Threads in July.

"I'm up for a cage match if he is lol," Musk said in an X post on June 20, 2023.

"Send Me Location," Zuckerberg responded via an Instagram story the next day.

But despite all the trash-talk and bluster, little would materialize from the banter between the two billionaires.

At one point, Musk claimed that the fight would be live-streamed on their respective social media platforms and that it would take place at an "epic location" in "ancient Rome."

Zuckerberg, however, said Musk never made it clear when they were scheduled to glove up and face off in the ring.

"I've been ready to fight since the day Elon challenged me. If he ever agrees on an actual date, you'll hear it from me," Zuckerberg said in a Threads post on August 11. "Until then, please assume anything he says has not been agreed on."

On the other hand, Musk seemed to see Zuckerberg's reluctance as a sign of cowardice.

"Zuck is a chicken," he wrote in an X post on August 13.

"He can't eat at chic fil a because that would be cannibalism," he wrote in a separate post on the same day, referencing the fast food chain famous for its chicken sandwiches.

To be sure, Musk also suggested that whatever fight he and Zuckerberg were gearing up for wouldn't have happened as quickly as he'd hoped. That was because he first needed to recover from some older injuries he had, Musk said.

"There is a problem with my right shoulder blade rubbing against my ribs, which requires minor surgery. Recovery will only take a few months," Musk said in an X post published on August 11.

In November, Zuckerberg also said that he tore his ACL while sparring and had surgery to fix it. This meant that he wouldn't be able to participate in a "competitive MMA fight" he planned for earlier this year.

Meta isn't the only tech company Musk has problems with. In fact, the mercurial billionaire has been picking fights with most of his peers in Silicon Valley.

On February 22, Musk went after Google after users claimed that the company's Gemini chatbot was "woke" and generating pictures of people of color in accurate historical contexts.

"I'm glad that Google overplayed their hand with their AI image generation, as it made their insane racist, anti-civilizational programming clear to all," Musk said in an X post.

Just a week later, on February 29, Musk filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, the AI company he cofounded with Sam Altman. In his lawsuit, Musk accused the ChatGPT maker of violating its nonprofit mission when it partnered with Microsoft.

"OpenAI should be renamed 'super closed source for maximum profit AI,' because this is what it actually is," Musk told journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin at last year's The New York Times' DealBook Summit.

Representatives for Musk and Zuckerberg didn't immediately respond to requests for comment from BI sent outside regular business hours.