Mark Zuckerberg is serious about having an MMA fight at some stage even if his plans have been on the backburner for the time being. The Meta CEO is a big fan of the sport and now works alongside UFC CEO Dana White after the promoter was recently added to the companies board of directors.
Throughout 2023, there was even talk of a fight between Zuckerberg and Elon Musk being promoted by White though the rumours and social media messages between them never materialized into something serious. With or without Musk, Zuck wants to compete but he wants to be able to commit to the training first.
He has been actively learning jiu-jitsu for some time and has seemingly been sparring in recent years also although his progress was halted by an ACL tear towards the end of 2023. Having spent time in the company of some of the best fighters in the world, along with watching them cage-side, Zuckerberg recently told Joe Rogan during a recent podcast that he still has intentions to compete.
“I want to [fight],” Zuckerberg said on The Joe Rogan Experience. “And I think I probably will, but we’ll see.”
The problem with setting a time frame is that Zuckerberg is expecting a big year due to the recent developments in AI which will have a massive impact on his business.
“2025 is going to be a very busy year on the AI side,” Mark said. “And I think the idea of having a competition, you really need to get into the head space of ‘I’m going to fight someone this week.’ So I need to figure this out because I don’t know how, with everything that’s going on in AI, I’m going to have like a week or two where I can just get into, like, ‘I’m going to fight someone.’ But it’s good training and I would like to [fight] at some point.”
He also spoke about his ACL injury changed his mindset towards training in jiu-jitsu versus the entire mixed martial arts skillset. Despite suffering the injury during sparring, it pushed him further towards MMA.
“The thing about the ACL injury is I kind of thought before, ‘All right, I’m going to do some jiu jitsu competitions, I want to do one MMA fight, one pro or competitive MMA fight,’” Zuckerberg said. “And then I figured I’d go back to jiu jitsu. But tearing the ACL striking is a little more of a fluke. I think you’re much more likely to do that grappling.”
“So going through the ACL experience didn’t make me want to just exclusively go do the version where you’re just attacking joints all day long. I’m like, ‘All right, I can take a few more punches to the face before going back to that.’”
