In the potential clash between billionaires Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, it seems that New Zealand's renowned City Kickboxing gym has chosen a side.
On Tuesday, UFC middleweight champion Israel Adesanya and featherweight champion Alexander Volkanovski shared Instagram photos after a training session, featuring an unexpectedly fit Zuckerberg. In the comments section of the post, the CEO of Meta expressed his gratitude for the opportunity to train with two of the sport's top pound-for-pound fighters, calling it an "honor."
This was not the first occasion for Volkanovski. The featherweight champion, who recently secured his fifth title defense by stopping Yair Rodriguez in the third round, had previously trained with Zuckerberg back in February as part of a demonstration of the Metaverse. During a recent interview on The MMA Hour, Volkanovski expressed his belief that the highly anticipated Zuckerberg vs. Musk matchup would actually materialize with the assistance of UFC president Dana White.
Furthermore, Volkanovski expressed his confidence in Zuckerberg's prospects of emerging victorious in the bout.
“I think it’s going to happen. And I’m telling you, Zuck’s competitive,” Volkanovski said.
“We know he’s already competed in jiu-jitsu, and he’s a pretty athletic. He get in there and I guess loves challenging himself, and this is going to be a challenge, something new, something exciting. And I think it could happen. Get me on that card though. I want to be on that card. I’ll help corner and be on that card as well.”
“He’s well-rounded,” Volkanovski added of Zuckerberg. “Like I said, he does it all. He does the striking and then he does the grappling. I think he’s compete — obviously he does a little bit more, he’s probably a lot more competitive on the ground. You’ve got to be a little bit more careful on the feet, especially with these clever guys, they don’t want to be sparring and getting punched in the head, especially with the brains that they have. So I think they’re going to do a lot more grappling, so he’s going to have a lot more experience grappling, because that’s something that he can obviously be a bit more competitive with.”
With retired UFC legend Georges St-Pierre recently sharing training photos alongside Musk, it seems that battle lines in the MMA world are already being drawn in anticipation of the potential matchup.