Misguided machismo

NEW DELHI: Back in June, when Elon Musk challenged Mark Zuckerberg to a caged fight and the latter laconically invited the former to ‘send location’, few thought it was anything but a lark, just two teenagers, 51 and 39 respectively, romping about. But we ought to have known better. These aren’t just any teenagers, they are the most teenaged trillionaires on the planet. They have the adolescence, they have the money. Their most throwaway words have a way of coming to be. Who believed it when Musk arrived on the scene and said he would put reusable rockets into orbit and take space tourists aboard?

Now, if Musk’s MRI scan permits it, it looks like the fight is going to happen. In fact, it’s going to be live-streamed from the Vegas Octagon, venue of mixed martial arts fights. The only point of dispute between the two combatants is the platform on which it will be live-streamed. Meta boss Zuck thinks X, Elon’s home base, is not reliable enough. For now, they’re just flexing, with Musk practising his signature move called the Walrus, which requires him to just sit on his opponent and do nothing. But at the moment it’s Zuck who needs to do nothing: he’s trained in jujitsu and 12 years younger.

But why are they fighting? What triggered the dispute, if anyone remembers it at all? Whatever poked Musk into issuing the challenge two months ago has since faded from public memory, replaced by the insults and counter-insults the two men have been trading from their respective social media platforms. Zuck has insinuated that Musk’s X, formerly called Twitter, might not have the heft to raise significant charity money from the fight, and the latter jabbed back at Zuck’s Threads, which signed up millions of new accounts right after opening and disgorged them just as quickly.

The Musk v Zuck fight, if it does happen, is a throwback to pre-industrial age duels, with just the same tinge of comedy and farce. The duel as a way of settling scores dates back to medieval days. It originated among the Germanic tribes of northern Europe and was imported into Mediterranean cultures. In its origins, it was an instrument of justice: a crime suspect had to fight a duel to prove his innocence. Later, in the Romance years of Europe, the duel was a private quarrel with swords to settle a matter of honour, or avenge an insult to prestige. Formalised and codified, it became a brawl with manners.

As a culture form, the duel lived on into the 19th century. No less a noble personality than Abraham Lincoln once almost fought a duel, challenged to it by a banker he wrote disparagingly about. In an anonymous letter to an Illinois periodical, the future president accused James Shields of corruption and topped it up with innuendo about the latter’s pursuit of women.

The aggrieved banker obtained the name of the writer from the editor of the periodical and challenged Lincoln to a duel on the river bank. Just as things got serious, the two men’s respective friends stepped in to stop it, right after seeing the very tall Lincoln’s sword reach and his sheer strength in cutting a tree branch to two.

Duel or a caged fight, it’s all about boys’ honour, which can only proved at the point of a sharp object or a tight fist. As Master Musk has said, “It’s a civilized form of war. Men love war”.