Europe is on high alert ever since Russia started the invasion of Ukraine. In the fall out from the invasion Russian athletes were sanctioned by most of sport’s governing bodies. UFC remains one of the only US based sport promotions regularly featuring Russian athletes.
But in the fall out of his actions many sport governing bodies personally condemned Putin. World Taekwondo federation even took back the ceremonial black belt they awarded him back in 2013.
Elon Musk may have taken the fight to Putin in a whole different way. Recently the richest man in the world published the following challenge on his social media:
“I hereby challenge Vladimir Putin to single combat,” he tweeted, using the Cyrillic font to write Mr Putin’s name.
“Stakes are Ukraine,” he continued, writing more in Cyrillic.
In a follow-up tweet, Musk then posted a whole message in Russian. “Do you agree to this fight?”, he wrote, tagging the Kremlin’s official English language Twitter account.
Musk didn’t leave it there either – he replied to a series of tweets about the issue. Musk took issue with a different twitter user who suggested that Putin would win easily (which is likely true, Putin has been an army man his whole career and holds a judo black belt).
“If Putin could so easily humiliate the west, then he would accept the challenge,” Elon Musk wrote. “But he will not.”
Musk has a somewhat active role in the conflict considering he’s providing Starlink space internet equipment to Ukraine. In addition to this he has mocked Russian officials on social media.
Musk has has an eccentric morning, having tweeted a series of strange posts.
In the hour before that post, he wrote “By the pricking of my thumbs”, an apparent reference to Macbeth – a lien that is followed by the phrase “something wicked this way comes”.