![Musk versus Zuckerberg in a cage match? Probably not.](https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/musk-vs-zuck-800x450.jpg)
Aurich Lawson | Getty Images ( David Paul Morris | Nathan Laine)
The Web is aflame this morning with the prospect of a cage match between two of the tech industry’s most outstanding and controversial leaders. Able to rumble within the red corner is Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk. And within the blue corner, now we have the founding father of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg.
Because the BBC and multiple other outlets have confirmed, Zuckerberg was entirely serious when he accepted Musk’s offer of a cage match by saying “send me location.” On Wednesday evening, Musk then replied with “Vegas Octagon.” This was a reference to the fenced-in area used for Ultimate Fighting Championship bouts in Las Vegas.
Given the humorous nature of Musk’s other responses to the proposed fight, comparable to “I even have this great move that I call ‘The Walrus’, where I just lie on top of my opponent & do nothing,” it seems probable that he isn’t overly serious. While Musk has the definite advantage in size, he’s 12 years older than Zuckerberg, and the Facebook founder regularly trains in mixed-martial arts.
Nonetheless, the feud between the 2 tech billionaires is completely legitimate. And what many of the coverage of this “cage match” exchange has missed is the origin of the dispute. It got here nearly seven years ago, when Facebook leased a part of the bandwidth on an Israeli-build satellite, Amos-6. Zuckerberg intended for this bandwidth to offer some areas of Africa with Web access to Facebook.
Starts with a rocket
This $200 million satellite was on account of launch on a Falcon 9 rocket in early September, 2016. On the morning of September 1, to save lots of a single day within the pre-launch preparation process, SpaceX had already affixed the satellite atop a Falcon 9 rocket ahead of its static fire test. And the countdown was going easily, until it wasn’t. Completely out of the blue, the rocket exploded violently, showering pieces of the vehicle into the swamplands for miles around. The satellite swan-dived to the bottom, a complete, fiery loss.
The Amos-6 accident—known internally at SpaceX as “Flight 29″—was a wrenching failure for a launch company. With the destruction of the Space Launch Complex-40 pad, SpaceX had no other pads in service on the time, and it had no rockets to launch. Moreover, it was the corporate’s second Falcon 9 failure in 15 months.
Musk was sleeping at his home in Los Angeles on the time of the accident. He awoke to the news of the failure and arrived on the SpaceX factory in Hawthorne, California, in regards to the same time that Zuckerberg took to Facebook to vent his frustrations.
“As I’m here in Africa, I’m deeply disillusioned to listen to that SpaceX’s launch failure destroyed our satellite that may have provided connectivity to so many entrepreneurs and everybody else across the continent,” Zuckerberg wrote.
This was not well received at SpaceX, where employees were distraught and pulling themselves together to start their second failure investigation in just a little greater than a 12 months. The sentiment shared by Musk, the corporate’s president, Gwynne Shotwell, and others was essentially that Zuckerberg was an “asshole” for what he had written, and when he had done so.
Delete Facebook
The emerging feud took one other step forward a few years later, when Musk deleted the Facebook pages for SpaceX and Tesla within the midst of the continued Cambridge Analytica scandal. This was in March 2018, when it was revealed that a British data firm that contracted with the Donald Trump presidential campaign had retained private data from 50 million Facebook users despite claiming to have deleted it.
Essentially, Musk piled onto the “Delete Facebook” movement, saying he “didn’t realize” that SpaceX even had a Facebook page and that Tesla’s “looked lame anyway.” The 2 pages were promptly taken down.
The tensions between the 2 billionaires have ratcheted up over the past 12 months as Musk began his adventures in Twitterland as a social media overlord. This brought him into direct competition with Facebook. Zuckerberg has responded by saying Facebook is working by itself version of a service like Twitter.