Dear Mark,
I can call you Mark, can't I? We're basically friends. I used your website, Facebook, almost every day starting in 2005. (Until about 2012, or whenever opening it started to feel like peeking into Event Horizon's hell dimension, but before it turned into The Website Where You Plan War Crimes—but we don't have to dwell on the past.) I feel like you and I are already close.
I did not believe you'd ever actually step into the cage for an MMA match against Elon Musk, even after he continued to insist he's up for it after challenging you last month. For one, he says lots of things he has no intentions of ever doing; he lies all the time, shamelessly and automatically, like a toddler. For another, he is a coward and you would destroy him.
Though giving up maybe 75 pounds, you have been training in Brazilian jujitsu for a year and a half, winning tournaments, and even when you lose, it's clear you know what you're doing on the mat. I shouldn't be surprised you've embraced it so completely. You are a tunnel-visioned Terminator: When you set your mind to something, you shut out all distractions, like "friendship" and "love" and "ethics" and "people yelling 'nobody wants the Metaverse.'" You are a compact, dead-eyed murder machine. Musk is built like a beanbag and "almost never" works out. It would not be a fair fight.
But curiously, Musk won't let the idea drop. He "trained" with a podcaster, and insisted that he has been instructed in the age-old martial art of, uh, "no-rules streetfighting." He seems to want this fight. Again, he is a liar, but also he is very dumb, so I don't know what to think.
Now comes a New York Times article indicating that you and Musk have been working behind the scenes toward making this thing happen, enlisting the services of Dana White to facilitate a charity match in Las Vegas. While I find it a little hard to believe that the three of you would be allowed to be in the same place at the same time without a designated dipshit survivor in a secure location, I am eager for this fight to happen. Musk deserves to feel the wrath of Zuck.
He deserved it when he called an actual, real-life hero a "pedophile" for showing him up, and hired a private investigator to smear the man. He deserved it when he unleashed upon unsuspecting pedestrians a fleet of shoddy, unaccountable self-driving vehicles, ones which appear to be programmed to disengage autopilot just before crashes so that they don't have to be reported. He deserved it for conning America's most gullible cities into spending money on ideas that would be bad even if they worked. He deserved it for being the wackest man on Earth.
He deserves it for any number of things, but he especially deserves it for turning Twitter into whatever the hell it is now. Unbanning our nation's most devoted racists wasn't enough for him; he had to hand them a megaphone. Killing the site's most useful and most entertaining API-dependent accounts and replacing them with a putrefied melange of crypto hucksters, pornbots, and fourth-rate dropshipping scammers wasn't enough for him. Turning verification from something useful for gathering information into something that sends our most dog-brained cretins surging to the top of any reply section wasn't enough for him. Now he's paywalling the goddamned tweets.
To be clear, no one believes his stated rationale for capping the number of tweets per day a user can view, because it would be unfathomably self-defeating, on a service where users are the product and not the customer, to throttle the product. It is much more likely that one of his latest dimwit whims broke Twitter's code and Musk long ago fired the only people who know how to fix it. It is perhaps even more likely than that that he simply hasn't paid his bills. Whatever the reason, it sucks. I'm not going to claim Twitter was ever this utopian, frictionless thing, but it was absolutely a useful place to discover news, find sources, promote work, watch sports communally, make friends both online and off, get laid, and read a lot of really funny jokes. Now it's a thing you sign into mostly to learn the latest way it's gotten worse. I'm mad about this and I'm not going to pretend I'm not!
Which brings us back to your fight against Musk. Mark, I am asking you to do everything in your power to make this happen before he backs out. Per the Times:
Mr. Zuckerberg’s friends and advisers have generally supported the match, two people close to him said, though others said a fight would be a distraction and not the best use of his time. One person close to Mr. Musk said that while he hated sports and didn’t appear to have the discipline to train regularly, no one could rule anything out with him.
You will annihilate him; this isn't even in question. But that's not enough. After you've slapped Musk around awhile and thoroughly humiliated him, what I want you to do is put him in a rear naked choke, closing off the blood to his brain. And then, Mark, I want you to not release the hold. No matter if the bell rings, or the referee or anyone else tries to pull you off. Hold the choke, for several minutes. Maybe up to 20 minutes. What will happen to him? I don't know, I'm not a doctor.
But I am a fight-loving citizen who is willing to offer you a crisp, new $5 bill if you will do this. This is not a joke. I am good for it; unlike certain Twitter investors, I keep my promises. This is a fast, easy, and painless way for you to earn five American dollars. If you, Mark Zuckerberg, can think of a better way to make money, I'd like to hear it.
I will even throw in a precious Bluesky invite code, to sweeten the deal.
And then, Mark, I'd like you to fight UFC Lightweight Champion Islam Makhachev, but we can talk about that later. For now I will be content, and $5 poorer but happy about it, if you just put Elon Musk to sleep. Deeply to sleep.
Thank you for your time,
Barry
