Renowned mixed martial arts coach Javier Mendez has predicted that Mark Zuckerberg would beat Elon Musk in the pair’s proposed cage fight, saying the Facebook CEO is ‘more of a dog’ than his counterpart.
Zuckerberg and fellow tech billionaire Musk, who is the owner of Twitter and CEO of Tesla, have agreed to fight one another, and Mendez has made a confident pick for the prospective bout.
Mendez coached former UFC champion Khabib Nurmagomedov and currently trains lightweight champion Islam Makhachev, and the American told Grosvernor Sport: “The big advantage Zuckerberg has over Elon is that he’s actively training and he’s more of a dog right now, because he entered a jiu-jitsu tournament, so that tells me a lot about him.
“From the little bit I’ve seen of Zuckerberg, he likes to engage and go at it. He’s very competitive. If I'm not mistaken, he did very well in a legitimate jiu-jitsu tournament, so he might have the dog in him because he was not afraid to expose himself.
“All things considered, Zuckerberg is way ahead of Musk, but you won’t really know until you see what Musk possesses. If Elon has no martial arts training whatsoever, he’s really behind. What he’d have to do is get in there and start slinging punches right away. Since Elon is bigger, does he have the power to go with the size? Does he have the speed to go with the size?”
Mendez, 52, also advised Musk to focus on preventing takedowns, given Zuckerberg’s grappling experience.
“My number-one priority for Musk would be to see how hard he could hit and how easy it would be for him to keep the fight standing up,” Mendez said. “Because Zuckerberg is so ahead of him with the jiu-jitsu, I would want Musk to think about ways to prevent takedowns. But you can't avoid a takedown just by trying to avoid it; you have to avoid it by striking.
Mark Zuckerberg (left) and Elon Musk have agreed to a ‘cage fight’ in Las Vegas— (Getty Images)
“Elon would need to learn how to strike and keep his distance, but he has to strike – otherwise it’s a matter of time before Mark would get him down. So, he has to learn defensive, distance striking, because he doesn’t want to go to the ground with Mark. That’s the first thing I’d want to see.
“You’ve also got to put him in bad positions on the ground. You can’t just practise stand-up, because if you just do stand-up, you're being an idiot. You might trip, and then you are on the ground; he needs to be prepared for the ground. I’d prepare him for everywhere, but the main objective would be to learn to strike. He is bigger, so he could utilise his size.”
UFC president Dana White has insisted that Zuckerberg, 39, and Musk, 52, are ‘dead serious’ about a fight.
Musk also seems to have agreed to train under UFC legend Georges St-Pierre, who offered to coach the Twitter and Tesla boss.
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