In the Billionaire’s Fight, We’re the Casualties

On Wednesday, Elon “Space Karen” Musk posted a message on Twitter (where else?) that he was “up for a cage fight” with Mark “The Zuck” Zuckerberg.

“Send me location”, Zuck replied. A bit ironic, seeing as Meta already has everyone’s live location.

We’re told they have since agreed a fight will take place in Las Vegas.

Let’s get the obvious out of the way. The odds of this cage match actually happening are almost nil. We’re talking about CEOs of public companies, who have boards and thousands of employees the world over. These people do not fight.

Musk also has a history of making wild promises and not following through, while Zuckerberg is likely ruminating on the old adage : “Never wrestle with a pig because you’ll both get dirty and the pig likes it”. Think how loathed you have to be to have a physical fight with Mark Zuckerberg… and everybody roots for Mark Zuckerberg.

Whether a “fight” happens or not is in any case immaterial — we’re all losing in this circus. And that’s not (only) because these two dinguses are spending their days planning fights while saying we’re unproductive when we work from home.

Every second they spend on this is a second they’re not spending fixing their crappy products. And that’s killing people.

Facebook still allows/fails to moderate the type of pages that have, in the past, led to real-life violence and death in the US. Not only is there no moderation… Facebook still promotes extremist content. The company is also yet to atone for the rampant hate and misinformation it let fester in Myanmar, which led to a freaking genocide.

The damage the company is responsible for is equally devastating at the individual level. From addictive designs leading to suicides, to a mental health epidemic the likes of which the world has never seen, mostly affecting young girls and women. And all that is before we even get to the “Instagram Connects Vast Pedophile Network” and “Indian WhatsApp lynchings” stories.

Musk and Tesla aren’t sitting pretty either. Tesla autopilot is such a joke that it needs a full Wikipedia page to list them all. Musk has killed at least 33 people over the past years (and as recently as March 2023), and he will kill again (what is phantom breaking, anyway?).

He’s also dealing with rampant abuse within his companies, from sexual harassment claims to racial discrimination. And all that comes without looking at Twitter’s continuous spread of right-wing/anti-vax misinformation, which I must stress again… is killing people.

These two men have a combined net worth of $345 billion (!), 150+ million followers (!) and 13+ kids (!). While a sporting boxing match may sound like fun on paper… they really have better things to do (raising kids that don’t start harmful tech companies would be a good start).

In 1992, two airline CEOs arm-wrestled to settle a lawsuit. If they’re so eager to prove how manly they are and don’t have “strong divorced dad energy”, may I recommend this instead?

Maybe the proceeds can go to the families of the millions of lives they’ve hurt with their awful companies.

Good luck out there.

Also published here.