In my mind I keep going back to that promised cage match. To the body slams and headlocks that never were. But what stays with me isn’t the overwrought antipathy between Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, the tetchy tech titans who, in the summer of 2023, made noises — let’s call them grunts — about demonstrating their reciprocal disdain by squaring off and throwing down on the kind of stage used for Ultimate Fighting Championship events.
It’s that two men who reached the zenith of riches and renown by dint of their indisputably superior minds were so vainly focused on their debatably remarkable muscles. The plutocrats yearned to be pugilists. The brainiacs itched to brawl. Not so keenly that they followed through with it; they huffed and puffed without ever coming to blows. But blows weren’t the point. Giving off a whiff of savagery and an impression of mighty brawn was.
When did brains fall so far out of fashion?
Oh, I know that by peacocking about their physical potency, Musk and Zuckerberg were largely addressing their insecurities — their genius had been well established and needed no such amplification. Even so, something about their posturing bespoke a bit of a cultural shift. It brought to mind the way Jeff Bezos, once so reedy and wan, had buffed up, glowed up and begun strutting around in shirts and vests that showcased his biceps. It suited the blunt language and brute ethos of the expanding manosphere, at least as I understand it. (I’m more a denizen of what might be called the wine-o-sphere, with occasional sojourns in the gin-o-sphere.)
Musk, Zuckerberg and Bezos are hardly you and me. But maybe they reflect something bigger than their moneyed selves: that when men evolve or ascend to a certain level of affluence and know-how, what they want is to throw their weight around, sometimes literally. To flex, fume and fight. That’s as valid an explanation of President Trump as any other. Not a bad explanation of many of his supporters, either.
Trump himself actually goes back and forth between boasting about his smarts (a “very stable genius,” he famously called himself) and his handsomeness (“you have never seen a body so beautiful,” he crowed last September). But his arc bends toward the cosmetic.
When he assembled his first administration eight years ago, he claimed that his cabinet had the highest I.Q. of any cabinet ever. As he assembles his current administration, appearances are claiming whatever foreground intellect supposedly held. It takes little web searching to find images of a shirtless Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s choice for secretary of health and human services. It takes even less to find images of a shirtless Pete Hegseth, who was confirmed last week as Trump’s defense secretary.