I have no idea who will win this blessed cage fight between two tech multi-billionaires, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. It’s not entirely clear if it’s going to continue, but I hope and pray it will.
As far as athletic competition goes, it’s going to be bigger than the Rumble In The Jungle, the Ali Foreman fight I watched as a kid. In the global imagination, it will be bigger than any one-on-one competition Hollywood has ever hosted – more entertaining than the battle between Emperor Commodus and his rival Maximus at the height of Gladiator.
I’ve never seen a cage fight. I have no idea about the rules. But as you’d expect, I’m betting my money on the older man, the one in his fifties.
Yes, I assume Musk will have the experience to bring down the 39-year-old top politician Zuckerberg. But honestly, who cares? It doesn’t matter who wins.
What matters and what is so wonderful is that this absurd event is given serious thought.
Yes, I assume Musk will have the experience to bring down the 39-year-old top politician Zuckerberg (center). But honestly, who cares? It doesn’t matter who wins.
What matters is that these two executives are said to be even more primed for what would normally be denounced as an outrageous display of toxic masculinity.
This cage fight is a milestone. These plutocrats, with their alpha-male antlers, are proving that if you’ve got enough money you can publicly satisfy your most primal instincts, let alone when the left says it’s all a bit juvenile.
Not to mention the wet blankets. Ditch the usual conventions of business – and settle the question the old-fashioned way, mano by mano. It’s a display of risk-taking and aggression that tells us a lot about America, the direction of the global economy and the big decisions Britain faces on Brexit.
I’m writing this on a US-made Apple laptop, the most beautiful and reliable I’ve ever owned – and it’s almost a decade old.
Shortly, when the writing’s incandescence is over, I’ll forward it to the Chron editors; And guess what? Sorry to say I don’t use BT broadband for this.
Under the dynamic government I used to lead, gigabit coverage in the UK went from 7 per cent to around 70 per cent of households, which in just over three years is not a bad state. But I’ve found that in some rural areas it’s still taking too long for Openreach to solve the problem, so stop it, I said and installed Starlink (prop. Elon Musk).
So this article will shortly ascend to one of the hundreds of low-orbit satellites it possesses before being transmitted to the Chron’s headquarters; And of course it pains me not to use the British system and I wish I didn’t make Mr Musk even richer.
But what is the alternative? We need good, reliable broadband, and the cage-fighting US tycoon is providing it. And what do you see on the dirt roads of the villages around us?
What kind of cars drive silently through the pretty lanes of Oxfordshire? Teslas – tons of zero-emission, battery-powered Teslas. They are made in the USA and the company is owned by this man Musk again.
I bet their owners would much rather have a British-made electric vehicle. But I’m afraid that right now – based on my rough count of the cars I pass on the streets – it looks like the US machines are finding customers faster than any other brand.
Musk’s automotive success proves that carbon-neutral green technology can create phenomenal wealth and millions of high-paying jobs. The answer is not to abandon the ambition to reach net zero – which doesn’t seem ecologically sound to me (or electorally sound) to me – but to work harder to ensure the UK economy benefits from the inevitable and growing Green Revolution.
It’s annoying to see that profits seem to be going to America at the moment; and all the empirical evidence I have cited – for America’s commercial and technological success – seems to be corroborated by the data.
These figures are so impressive that they have become widely known; but they deserve to be repeated. According to a recent study by the European Council on Foreign Relations, there has been a radical divergence in economic performance between Europe (including the UK) and the US over the past 15 years since the 2008 crash
In 2008, the EU economy was slightly larger than the US – which it should have been, given that the EU (plus the UK) has about 500 million people, compared to about 330 million in the US
Musk’s automotive triumph proves that carbon-neutral green technology can create phenomenal wealth and millions of high-paying jobs, and the answer isn’t to abandon the goal of becoming carbon-neutral
Today the USA is leaving Europe behind. The EU and UK had a combined GDP of $19 trillion last year. The US has grown to $25 trillion.
That means the US is now almost 50 percent larger than the Eurozone! And that with around 100 million fewer people!
The difference is so big it has become embarrassing and of course different people will find different solutions.
In Brussels, Commission officials will say that we need to ‘complete’ the EU’s internal market. If only we had more “harmonisation” and more regulation, we would produce European “champions” of the magnitude of Microsoft, Tesla and Apple.
What a bungle! Does anyone still believe that? One of the main reasons why I was so vehemently supportive of Brexit was precisely that I believe Britain needs to escape from this tired and failed European economic model, with its ill-conceived regulation and huge non-wage labor costs.
Well folks, seven years later and – thanks in part to Covid – we still haven’t reached escape velocity; We are still being held captive by the gravitational pull of the EU and (I might as well say it) deals like the Windsor framework are of no help because they make it harder for the whole UK, including Northern Ireland, to break away from the EU distinguish regimes.
But we have made a start. We are different in life sciences and financial services and have the potential to go much further and faster. We need to show that Brexit Britain is now radically different, a place to invest and grow faster than anywhere else in Europe.
As I have already indicated, we should not raise corporate taxes. We should undercut the Irish and make this place, to put it bluntly, more American in our approach to personal and corporate taxation and wealth creation.
We have to show that we actually admire and appreciate the mad spirit of adventure that has made these cage fighters billions. We need to unleash in this country the originality and energy that these American giants created – including a willingness to say or do the unthinkable. Because if we don’t, we end up in a weak, more boring and poorer country that is still magnetically connected to a weak, more boring and poorer Europe.
By the way, if the Musk-Zuckerberg fight happens, I’ll challenge the winner to a Cumberland wrestling pankration. And as prize money, I suggest that the winner gets half of the annual income of the other.
dictionary corner
Pankration: An ancient Greek sport combining boxing and wrestling, founded in 648 BC. was introduced