BORIS JOHNSON: What the frenzied cage fight between Musk and Zuckerberg tells us about how to make Brexit Britain richer

I have no idea who will win this blessed cage fight between the two tech multibillionaires, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. It’s not entirely clear if it’s still on, though I hope and pray it does.

As sports competitions go, it will be bigger than the Rumble In The Jungle, the Ali-Foreman fight I kept watching as a kid. It will be bigger, in the global imagination, than any one-on-one match ever staged by Hollywood – more fun than the fight 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 my money, as you would expect, is on the older guy, the one in his fifties.

Yes, I expect Musk to have the experience to floor 39-year-old whip-snapper Zuckerberg. But honestly, who cares? It doesn’t matter who wins.

What matters, and what is so glorious, is that this ridiculous event is being given some serious thought.

The bottom line is that this pair of businessmen are pumping iron even now in preparation for what would normally be denounced as an outrageous display of toxic masculinity.

This cage fight is a milestone. By locking up their alpha male antlers, these plutocrats will prove that if you have enough money, you can publicly satisfy your most primal instincts, and it doesn’t matter if the leftists say it’s all a bit teenage.

Don’t mind the wet blankets. Get rid of the usual conventions of the business world – and settle the matter the old way, mano a mano. It’s an expression of risk-taking and aggression that tells us a lot about America, about the direction of the global economy – and about the big choices Brexit Britain faces.

I’m writing this on an American-made Apple laptop, the most beautiful and reliable I’ve ever owned – and it’s almost a decade old.

Soon, when the white heat of the composition is over, I’ll ping it to the editors of the Daily Mail; and you know what – I’m sorry to say I’m not using BT broadband for this.

Under the dynamic government I led, gigabit coverage in the UK rose from 7% to around 70% of households, which was not bad in just over three years. But I’ve found that in some rural areas it still takes too long for Openreach to sort you out, so hang it all up, I said, and installed Starlink (prop. Elon Musk).

So this piece will soon take off to one of the hundreds of low-orbit satellites it owns, before being beamed to Daily Mail 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’s the alternative? We need good, reliable broadband, and the cage-fighting American tycoon is providing it. And what do you see on the gravel paths of the villages around us?

What kind of cars quietly drive down Oxfordshire’s pretty avenues? Teslas – lots and lots of zero-emission battery-powered Teslas. They are manufactured in the United States and the company is back in the hands of that man Musk.

I bet their owners would much rather have a British-made electric vehicle. But I’m afraid at the moment – based on my rough count of the cars I pass on the road – it seems that the American machines are finding customers faster than any other brand.

Musk’s motoring triumph proves that you can create phenomenal wealth and millions of high-wage jobs with zero-friendly green technology. or electorally wise, come on) – but to work harder to ensure the UK economy benefits from the inevitable and growing green revolution.

It’s annoying to see that the profits seem to be going to America at the moment; and all the empirical evidence I have cited – of American commercial and technological success – seems to be corroborated by the data.

These figures are so stunning that they have become famous; but they deserve repetition. According to a recent study by the European Council on Foreign Relations, the past 15 years – since the 2008 crash – have seen a radical divergence in economic performance between Europe (including Britain) and the US.

In 2008, the EU’s economy was slightly larger than the US – and it should have been, as the EU (plus Britain) has a population of around 500 million, compared to around 330 million in the US

Today, the US is lapping Europe behind. The EU plus Britain had a total GDP of $19 trillion last year. The US has skyrocketed to $25 trillion.

That means the US is now almost 50 percent bigger than the Eurozone! And with about 100 million less people!

The difference is so great that it has become embarrassing and of course different people will come up with 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’ on the scale of Microsoft and Tesla and Apple.

What a shame! Anyone still believe this stuff? One of the main reasons I supported Brexit so strongly was precisely because I believe Britain needs to escape from this tired and failing European economic model, with its ill-conceived regulations and huge non-wage costs.

Well folks, seven years later and – thanks in part to Covid – we still haven’t reached escape velocity; we’re still caught up in the pull of the EU, and (I might as well say it) agreements like the Windsor Framework don’t help, because they make it harder for the whole of the UK, including Northern Ireland, to be different from the EU regimes.

But we’ve made a start. We differ on life sciences and financial services, and we have the potential to go much further and faster. We need to show that Brexit Britain is now radically different, a place where you can invest and grow faster than anywhere else in Europe.

As I have suggested before, we should not raise corporate taxes. We should be undermining the Irish by making this place – let’s be clear – more American in our attitude to personal and business taxation and wealth creation.

We need to show that we really admire and appreciate the crazy adventurous spirit that has propelled these cage fighters to their billions. We must unleash in this country the originality and energy that these American giants have created – including a willingness to say or do the unthinkable. Because if we don’t, we will end up in a usurier, duller, poorer country, still magnetically linked to a more awake, duller, poorer Europe.

By the way, if the Musk-Zuckerberg fight continues, I’m challenging the winner to a Cumberland wrestling pankration*. And as prize money, I propose that the victor receives half of the other’s annual income.

Dictionary corner

Pankration: An ancient Greek sport combining boxing and wrestling, introduced in 648 BC