UFC veteran Chael Sonnen believes a fight between tech titans Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg could sell 25million pay-per-view buys.
Musk and Zuckerberg have caused a stir in the combat sports world since teasing a potential MMA fight. UFC boss Dana White has already printed custom t-shirts to promote the fight whilst several fighters such as Jon Jones and Sean Strickland have offered to help train the Tesla boss and Meta co-founder.
White believes Musk vs Zuckerberg would be the "biggest fight ever in the history of the world" and Sonnen seemingly agrees with that take. The highest-selling fight took place in 2015 when Floyd Mayweather beat Manny Pacquiao as the 'Fight of the Century' sold 4.6million pay-per-view buys. Sonnen believes Musk vs Zuckerberg could do five times that amount.
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“You could for sure do 10 million plus but you could be closer to 20 and 25 million," he said on The MMA Hour. "What I would predict is both of their companies would start some kind of a digital arm. All of a sudden, I believe that Twitter would be hosting pay-per-views and I believe Facebook would as well. Now you’re talking 25 million views here. You could do that if the business shifted and changed a little bit.
“The fact that one billionaire wants to fight another billionaire and somebody will call a third billionaire for permission... I don’t really know where that comes from but I’ve got to give Dana credit here. There’s no other promoter that can even come to the table now. It’d be weird. Those two either fight in UFC or they don’t fight at all, I think we can agree on that... and that really was a strategic move by Dana."
White would charge fans $100 for the pay-per-view but Musk and Zuckerberg would donate all the money they earn from the fight to charity. The UFC boss spent 90 minutes on the phone with each of the tech bosses, who are both "dead serious" about the fight. Sonnen has insisted that Musk and Zuckerberg wouldn't need White to make the fight and could instead stream it on their respective platforms.
“They don’t need Dana. They didn’t need permission They didn’t need this third party," Sonnen added. "They could do it on their platforms. If there’s [7] billion people on Earth like they speculate, 5.5 billion would see that fight. Just through their platforms. I just share that with you, that if it is something fun and he has an opportunity and he wants to bring it to us, it’d be very nice of Dana. It would be rude of him to not bring it to us.”
