When elephants fight, goes an old saying, it is the grass that suffers. When Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg – with a combined wealth of 245 billion dollars – get into the cage for an ego-humbling fight, we know who the elephants are. But the grass? That’s a more difficult question to answer.
Is this what billionaires do when they get bored? What happens next? Does the winner take on Jeff Bezos or Mukesh Ambani, No. 3 and No. 9 respectively on the Forbes rich list? Or will there be a strategic ‘draw’ leaving egos uncrushed and stock markets unaffected? That would be deeply unsatisfactory, even if the fighters’ families might not agree. Perhaps this could become an international event open only to billionaires. Bill Gates versus Warren Buffet anybody?
When I started writing this column, the fight was to be in Las Vegas. Now it will be at the Coliseum in Rome. By the time you get to read this, the venue might have shifted to the cricket stadium in Ahmedabad. Or it might have been called off by the respective parents – like parents of spoilt brats do everywhere.
The Ultimate Fighting Championship which hopes to host the fight is salivating at the prospect of pay-per-view television bringing in hundreds of millions, perhaps even a billion. The rest of the world is salivating at the prospect of at least one of the fighters shutting his mouth for a short period of time.
It might have started off as a joke, Musk tweeting Zuckerberg that he was “up for a fight”, and Zuckerberg responding on Instagram with “send me the location.” Now neither can pull out without loss of face. It is a wonderful commentary on social media – once it’s out there, things take on a life of their own. Subtlety, nuance, sarcasm are strangers to social media.
In more rational times, the proper response might have been, “Are you crazy, Elon, old chum? You might have more money than me, but I am twelve years younger and I’d hate to be blamed for maiming the richest man in the world. That cannot be my legacy.” To which Musk might have replied, “Zucky baby, of course I was joking. Like the time I said I would make my dog the chief executive of Twitter. In any case, you might be younger, but I am taller by at least five inches, and I’d hate it if my legacy were that I sent the world’s 16th richest man through the floor with a tap on the head.”
Perhaps the grass that will suffer, going back to the old saying, is common sense and decency. If billionaires, however bored, think the best way to settle differences is to attempt to give each other a black eye in a cage, then all that money is going into the wrong hands.
It would be poetic justice if the men knocked each other out and finished with identical injuries. That would be deeply satisfying, a draw viewers wouldn’t mind.
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