“Did you see the octagon I put in the backyard?” Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg texted his wife, Priscilla Chan.
“Yes, I saw it,” Chan responded.
“It looks awesome.”
“Mark.”
Zuckerberg posted on his Instagram story today a screenshot of a WhatsApp conversation between him and his wife. The messages show him asking if she’d seen the “awesome” fighting cage that he set up in their backyard. Her curt responses gave the impression that she was less than pleased about it.
“We have plenty of yard space!” Zuckerberg said.
“I have been working on that grass for two years,” she replied.
Zuckerberg has been on a fitness transformation over the past few years. During the pandemic, the tech mogul took up the martial art of Brazilian jujitsu, winning gold and silver medals at a tournament in May.
He also participated in the Murph Challenge on Memorial Day, named after a Navy SEAL who was killed in action in Afghanistan. The workout entails wearing a 20-pound weighted vest and completing 100 pull-ups, 200 push-ups, 300 squats, and a mile-long run. Zuckerberg finished the challenge in under 40 minutes, and he shared his time with his 12.3 million followers on Instagram.
In June, fellow billionaire Elon Musk used Twitter, now renamed X, to publicly challenge Zuckerberg to a cage fight. A few hours later, Zuckerberg responded via Instagram with a screenshot of Musk’s tweet and the caption, “Send Me Location.” The fight still has not happened.
More recently, Zuckerberg gave a glimpse into his 4,000-calorie diet, needed to offset his MMA training, when he responded to a McDonald’s thread post asking about everyone’s orders. Zuckerberg responded: “20 nuggets, a quarter pounder, large fries, Oreo McFlurry, apple pie, and maybe some side cheeseburgers for later?”
In a subsequent post, he explained, “Not cutting weight so I need ~4000 calories a day to offset all the activity. And it’s so delicious…:”
Zuckerberg isn’t the only hotshot tech executive getting washboard abs. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos has also attracted attention for his recent muscular physique.
In addition to dealing with a fighting cage in her backyard, Zuckerberg’s wife, Chan, is a philanthropist and former pediatrician. The two reportedly met at a fraternity party in 2003 while attending Harvard University, where Zuckerberg famously started Facebook in his dorm room, according to the New York Times. They married on May 19, 2012, only a day after Facebook went public on the stock market.
The couple now lives in Palo Alto, Calif., with their three children. Zuckerberg reportedly paid $7 million for the five-bedroom, five-bathroom mansion, and he equipped it with a personal A.I. assistant named Jarvis, according to CNBC.