The subject of the wrestling match between the bosses of Tesla and Facebook raises is much more political than it seems.
This article is taken from the #Rule30 newsletter, which is sent every Wednesday at 11 a.m.
To register for free to receive it, it’s here.
I tend to laugh when I’m nervous. I giggle during funerals, I giggle during very serious professional meetings (especially if they go badly), I screw up if I see someone fall in the street. It is involuntary, annoying, inevitable. Life sometimes puts pressure on me, and that’s how my body decides to release it. For example, last week when I learned that Elon Musk was offering to fight Mark Zuckerberg in a cage, I couldn’t help but burst out laughing.
Like many goofy stories on the internet, this one started on Twitter. During a discussion with a user, Elon Musk announced that he was ready to face Mark Zuckerberg in an MMA match (mixed martial arts, a discipline that usually takes place in a mesh ring, the famous ” cage “). It was obviously a valve, as Elon Musk publishes dozens a day on his Twitter account. Except that Mark Zuckerberg split a response in an Instagram story, inviting the richest man in the world to communicate to him a place for their future confrontation.
This brief exchange provoked a media circus made up of memes, emoji who cry with laughter, more or less circumspect press articles, and reminders from both sides of the hypothetical fight. Meta’s communications team declined to confirm to the media The Verge whether or not it was a joke. Elon Musk indicated he wanted to fight in Las Vegas, then joked about his poor physical condition. On Sunday, in an interview with a journalist from Bloomberghe repeated that the match “ could very well take place “.
Where we nurture the manhood that Mark Zuckerberg seeks to build
It doesn’t matter if this fight has an ounce of reality. What is proven is that Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk have already won: the attention of the media, and ours. If the CEO of Twitter has been taunting that of Meta for several months, it is because the latter is preparing to launch a competing service to the social network of micro-messages. This real false match offers him a nice indirect publicity. He also feeds the new virile image that Mark Zuckerberg has been trying to build for some time, by proclaiming loud and clear his obsession with Brazilian ju-jitsu, military training or the Joe Rogan podcast. These interests, widely promoted on his Instagram account, are part of a strategy assumed by the entrepreneur and his company’s communication team: to make Mark Zuckerberg a ” tech bro ” like the others.
The confrontation between Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg is therefore above all a story of men. As reminded The world, it echoes a long tradition of clashes between rappers or, more recently, online creators. It also reflects the eminently masculine nature of the new technologies industry and the platforms it has built. Whether Mark Zuckerberg is lean or muscular, he simply fits two different shades of hegemonic man, genius geek or fighter. What matters is power, whether it comes from the body or from its economic empire.
This is why the figure of Elon Musk fascinates his peers in the digital industry so much (he was also the guest of honor at the VivaTech fair a few weeks ago), despite his misogyny, his transphobia , his anti-Semitism, his taste for misinformation and conspiracy theories, characteristics openly documented on his own Twitter account. We admire him for his demonstrations of force, or we cannot escape him, because he dominates the recommendation algorithms, in a web precisely built to promote confrontations, outrageous remarks and violence. Can we trust people who are so quick to berate each other in public to develop healthy spaces for discussion? ” Bro culture is back in Silicon Valley », announced at the end of 2022 the New York Times. Or maybe she had hidden away, right under our fingertips.
Do you want to know everything about the mobility of tomorrow, from electric cars to pedelecs? Subscribe now to our Watt Else newsletter!