Just when the manufactured hype around the Elon Musk-Mark Zuckerberg duel seemed to be dying down, the Tesla CEO has rekindled speculations with latest ‘ready to fight’ remark

In a startling turn of events, Tesla chief Elon Musk transitioned quickly from applauding Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to conveying readiness to confront him “any place, any time”. The astonishing appreciation came soon after Musk acknowledged Meta’s latest AI model, Llama 3.1, in reaction to a tweet by former Tesla AI director Andrej Karpathy. Commending Meta on the model’s release, Karpathy underlined its capabilities and open accessibility. Musk, in a tweet, praised Zuckerberg for open-sourcing Llama 3.1. “It is impressive and Zuck does deserve credit for open-sourcing (allowing free public access),” he wrote. According to some reports, Llama 3.1 has outclassed OpenAI’s GPT-4.

Musk’s praise raised few eyebrows, given his earlier accusations against Meta for alleged intellectual property violations. These allegations were linked to Meta’s launch of Threads, which Musk claimed involved illegitimate use of Twitter’s trade secrets. In a response to Musk’s initial appreciation, one particular user on X commented, “Strange to see Musk & Zuck come to similar conclusions, but refreshing,” while another user praised Musk’s gesture as “gracious.”

However, Musk’s positive stance hastily shifted during his visit to Capitol Hill (Washington DC), where he asserted his readiness to confront Zuckerberg. Speaking to reporters before Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to Congress, Musk affirmed, “I’ll fight Zuckerberg any place, any time, any rules,” a statement that has since gone viral on social media. Musk’s comment again started a barrage of reactions with one particular user commenting, “This will be crazy if it happens.”

Musk-Mark chequered past

The two tech magnates decided to join forces for the launch of a satellite in 2016. But, the association between the two billionaires went sour when Zuckerberg’s $200 million satellite exploded in a pre-launch test accident on one of Elon’s SpaceX rockets. Following the explosion, Zuckerberg wrote on Facebook that he was “deeply disappointed” that “SpaceX’s launch failure destroyed our satellite.” Afterward, Zuckerberg took a swipe at Elon for the latter’s take on the dangers related to artificial intelligence. “Naysayers try to drum up doomsday scenarios,” said Zuckerberg. Responding to Zuckerberg, Musk wrote on X, “I’ve talked to Mark about this. His understanding of the subject is limited.” In 2018, Elon took the feud a step further by tweeting, “What’s Facebook?”

In due course, the ‘word-war’ escalated to a point where Elon wrote that he was up for a ‘cage match’. While the tweet seemed just another one of Musk’s blunt remarks, Zuckerberg took the challenge earnestly and posted a screenshot of Musk’s tweet on Instagram with the caption, “send me location”. Musk responded, saying, “Vegas Octagon”.