Elon Musk will be trained by UFC legend Georges St-Pierre
And in the blue-check corner …
Twitter boss Elon Musk on Tuesday accepted an offer by UFC legend Georges St-Pierre to train him for his cage fight with Facebook rival Mark Zuckerberg.
The 42-year-old retired champ first offered his services on Saturday, tweeting at Musk: “I’m a huge fan of yours and it would be an absolute honor to help you and be your training partner for the challenge against Zuckerberg.”
Musk — who had a similar offer from accused human-trafficking rapist Andrew Tate — announced just after midnight that he was going in on Team GSP.
“Ok, let’s do it,” he replied to St-Pierre with two fire emojis.
Musk, 51, first challenged Zuckerberg to a “cage match” after his Meta-owned Instagram reported plans to build a text-based social media platform to rival Musk’s Twitter.
Zuckerberg accepted by riffing on Khabib Nurmagomedov’s viral challenge to Conor McGregor, writing: “Send Me Location.”
The Facebook founder recently has become a keen MMA student, training with Dave Caramillo and recently winning his first amateur Brazilian jiu-jitsu (BJJ) tournament.
Still, Musk has the size advantage, and last year told Joe Rogan that he has a history in Kyokushin karate, taekwondo, judo, and “Brazilian jiu-jitsu briefly” when he was a boy.
He confirmed that he has now started training, tweeting early Tuesday that he “did a practice round” with podcaster Lex Fridman, a BJJ black belt.
Fridman on Monday also shared a video of him training on the mats with Zuckerberg.
“It’s inspiring to see both Elon and Mark taking on the martial arts journey,” the MIT scientist wrote, without comparing the skills of each.
Not everyone seems as keen, however — with Musk’s 75-year-old mom, Maye, tweeting Fridman last week: “Don’t encourage this match!”
“Actually, I canceled the fight. I haven’t told them yet. But I will continue to say the fight is canceled, just in case…,” the model wrote, getting a laughing emoji response from her son.
