Republican Senator Says Mark Zuckerberg Challenged Him to a Cage Fight

Mark Zuckerberg is itching for a fight. Markwayne Mullin, a Republican Senator from Oklahoma, revealed that the Facebook founder has invited him to spar multiple times while talking to human cringe factory Benny Johnson during an appearance on The Benny Show.

“Mark has actually reached out to me, texted me a couple times. The guy’s gotten into jujitsu real heavy, he wants me to come down there and roll with him,” Mullin said. “He wants to train, he actually wants to get in the cage and fight. He said, ‘I’d love for you to come down and spar with me sometime.’ I think that’d be great to go down there and do that.”

Mullin is no stranger to fights, it’s just that he tends to be the one issuing the challenge. He made headlines back in 2023 when he challenged Sean O’Brien, the president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, to fight on the floor of Congress over some critical tweets that O’Brien had made about him. The whole thing devolved into a yelling match with a whole lot of posturing and no actual fisticuffs, which seems like it’s about the speed Mullin is most comfortable operating these days.

There is some fight in Mullin’s past—he registered a 3-0 record in three matches in the Xtreme Fighting League, a local fighting circuit in Oklahoma. But he hasn’t been in the octagon for an official match since 2007.

Zuck, meanwhile, has been building up his fighting resume for a couple of years. He reportedly picked up Brazilian jiu-jitsu sometime around 2022, getting professional training from UFC stars. The tech exec netted a medal in the first tournament he appeared in, then famously got challenged to a cage match by Elon Musk. Sadly, that never came to fruition because as soon as Zuck told Musk to drop a pin and knuckle up, Twitter’s owner issued a series of the saddest cop-outs committed to the internet, including having his mom intervene for him.

While Zuckerberg tore his ACL sparring shortly after the online kerfuffle, he’s apparently recovered and ready to get back in the ring. He’s so all-in on his MMA era that he added UFC head Dana White to Facebook’s board.

So sure, why not challenge a Senator with a history in the ring to throw down? If nothing else, it signals Zuck’s full right-wing turn. He’s been buddying up to Trump for months and, per Mullin, even met with the President-elect before announcing that Facebook would do away with fact-checking—a feature that Trump notoriously railed against.

If Zuckerberg shows up at the next Meta keynote with a black eye, we’ll know how his match with Mullin turned out, but at least he can claim victory on Facebook and no one can fact-check him.