Zuckerberg Told Musk to Send a Location for a Cage Match, and Dana White Says the Colosseum Wanted $150 Million to Host It

The cage match was supposed to be a joke that got out of a group chat. It turned into conference calls, a neck, a backyard, and a price tag with a ruin attached. On the night of June 20, 2023, Elon Musk, then deep into the project of turning Twitter into whatever he wanted it to be, answered the news that Meta was building a text app with a sentence he clearly enjoyed typing. “I’m up for a cage match if he is lol.” Mark Zuckerberg did not lol back in the same window. He posted a screenshot of Musk’s line on Instagram with three words underneath: “Send me location.”

The location never arrived in any form a commission could recognize. What arrived instead was a summer of venue talk, a UFC president who insisted both men were serious, and a Threads post in August in which Zuckerberg declared the bit over. Three years later Dana White was still describing the negotiations as real, and he put a number on the fantasy. At a UFC press conference in Las Vegas on June 21, 2026, White said he had spent two weeks in his backyard working the fight, that Musk and Zuckerberg had wanted the Colosseum in Rome, and that the Colosseum’s side of the conversation had landed near $150 million, money he said would have gone into a fund for restoring Italy’s landmarks. “That was real,” he said. “Those two were gonna put up the money.” Asked whether he would still put a UFC card in the ancient arena if someone else paid, he said he was in.

The fight that required that kind of money never had a contract, a date, or a weigh-in. It had a product launch. Meta’s text app, Threads, was the context Musk was swatting at. Inside the company, chief product officer Chris Cox had told staff the bet was that creators wanted a version of a public square that was “sanely run,” a line aimed straight at the platform Musk had bought. Threads opened in early July 2023 and signed up tens of millions of accounts in days, then settled into the long, less cinematic work of being a social network. The cage match was the cinematic part. It let two chief executives pretend the argument was about biceps instead of distribution.

Who was actually ready to fight

Zuckerberg had a hobby that made the screenshot dangerous. By the summer of 2023 he was training Brazilian jiu-jitsu in public and had already competed in a tournament that spring, medals and all, the kind of detail that separates a poster from a participant. Musk’s athletic case was the sentence he posted on June 21. “I have this great move that I call ‘The Walrus,’ where I just lie on top of my opponent and do nothing.” It was funny. It was also a preview of the problem White would later describe. One man was collecting mat time. The other was collecting replies.

White, in July 2023, told reporters he had been on the phone with both of them until 12:45 in the morning and that both wanted to do it. He floated the bout as potentially the biggest fight in history and talked about Las Vegas before the scenery got imperial. On August 11, Musk teased an “epic location” in Italy, said the frame would evoke ancient Rome, and suggested the event would be run by his foundation and Zuckerberg’s rather than by the UFC, with the money going to charity. Italy’s culture ministry, in the reporting that followed, did not confirm that the Colosseum had been offered as a venue. The gap between a billionaire’s post and a monument’s calendar was the whole story, and it was already visible before anyone said the words one hundred and fifty million.

Other people tried to climb into the bit. Andrew Tate, the kickboxer who brands himself a tutor to angry men, offered on June 22, 2023, to train Musk and promised he would not lose. Tate was, at the time, entangled in criminal cases in Romania. He and his brother Tristan later faced a separate slate of charges in Britain, including rape and trafficking allegations they have denied, a case The AEGIS Alliance has covered on its own. His training offer did not make the bout more real. It showed who thought a billionaire slap-fight was a recruitment poster. Georges St-Pierre, a former UFC champion whose opinion of a fight is worth more than a reply guy’s, was reported to have worked with Musk and also to have doubted the matchup should happen at all. That chapter is its own piece: St-Pierre, the offer to coach, and the warning.

The week it died, and the year the price came out

The collapse was not mysterious. Musk said he might need surgery on his neck and back. He called the timing in flux. He suggested a practice round in Zuckerberg’s backyard, which is what you propose when you do not want a commission, a referee, or a ticket that says a date. On August 13, 2023, Zuckerberg ended it on Threads. “I think we can all agree Elon isn’t serious and it’s time to move on,” he wrote. He said he had offered a real date, that Dana White had offered to make it a legitimate charity competition, and that if Musk ever got serious about a date and an official event, he knew how to reach him. Otherwise Zuckerberg was going back to competing with people who take the sport seriously. Musk’s answer, in the posts that followed, was to call him a chicken and to insist the original challenge had been a joke the other man had fumbled. Both versions can be marketing. Only one of them matches a man who had already fought in a jiu-jitsu bracket.

White did not let the story stay in 2023. On Tucker Carlson’s show in February 2025 he said he had been on conference calls with the Italian government about staging the bout at the Colosseum, that it had been fun while it lasted, and that it had fallen apart. He also said the episode pulled him closer to Zuckerberg. The Meta chief later put White on the company’s board, a seating arrangement nobody would have predicted from a Walrus tweet. The February telling still lacked the figure that made the June 2026 press conference travel. One hundred and fifty million dollars is not a vibe. It is a restoration budget with two names on it. White’s line that the Colosseum would have taken the fight because those two were going to pay is the first version in which the monument is not a meme. It is a counterparty with a number.

A clip that spread at the end of August 2026 put Joe Rogan and MrBeast on the same memory. Rogan described the Rome plan as real enough to have a venue cost in that range and then dismissed the sporting value. Zuckerberg, he said, trains obsessively. Musk, in Rogan’s telling, would have been out of his depth, a big man confusing size with a martial art. MrBeast’s contribution was that he had once been invited to train and had declined. The sporting press did not need the podcast to reach the same conclusion. White himself has said, in other moments, that Zuckerberg would beat people who mock the training. The $150 million would have bought a stadium, not a competitive mystery.

What the dare was a substitute for

Threads did not kill Twitter, and Twitter’s rebrand to X did not kill Threads. The cage match did not adjudicate which man understands speech, ads, or an algorithm. It adjudicated nothing, which is why it lasted as content. An April 2024 rumor that the bout would sit as a co-main under Mike Tyson and Jake Paul was a gag, not a card, and The AEGIS Alliance treated it as one. Tyson and Paul eventually shared a Netflix ring. Zuckerberg and Musk did not share a cage, a charity contract, or a restoration fund.

The useful record is the sequence, not the fantasy booking. Musk issued a public challenge tied to a competitor’s product. Zuckerberg answered with a location request and a body of training that made the answer awkward to laugh off. White spent real hours, by his account across two separate tellings, trying to turn that into a sanctioned fight, including talks that reached the Italian government and a price, stated in 2026, of about $150 million to use the Colosseum. Musk pleaded his spine and a backyard spar. Zuckerberg said the date never came and went back to the mat. White, three years on, still sounded like a promoter who had seen the money and the monument in the same sentence and watched both leave.

Send me location was a good caption. The location, when someone finally itemized it, was an archaeological site with a restoration invoice and two men who never stood on the same mat. The Walrus remains undefeated, because it was never required to fight. Zuckerberg’s tournament record remains the only result in this story that a referee has written down. Everything else was a negotiation White says was real, for an event that never had a bell.

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