Mark Zuckerberg’s ‘awkward’ moment captured before Volkanovski UFC fight

Facebook founder and Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg was seen in Alexander “Volk” Volkanovski’s corner on Saturday night, as the Australian mixed martial artist took on Georgian-Spanish fighter Ilia Topuria at UFC 298 in Anaheim, California.

Footage captured Zuckerberg – whose experience in jiu-jitsu saw him challenged to a cage fight by Twitter/X owner Elon Musk last year, only for it to never actually happen – nodding enthusiastically and trying to shake Volk’s hand before his fight, which he lost after being knocked out cold in the second round.

The tech entrepreneur has long been mocked for his awkward and ‘robotic’ interactions, with his 2018 appearance in Congress to answer questions about Cambridge Analytica sparking comparisons to the Star Trek android, Data.

He has also been the subject of a baseless conspiracy theory which claims he is actually a lizard – something the billionaire ridiculed in 2016 during a live Q&A.

Zuckerberg shared a commonly asked question on whether he was "secretly a lizard."

In response, he said: "I’m going to have to go with ‘no’ on that – I’m not a lizard but keep your high-quality comments coming in, please.”

In that same year, after a picture surfaced of him walking past a crowd of people all wearing VR headsets, he denied “enjoying” that he was seemingly commanding a so-called “VR army” in an interview with German newspaper, Die Welt.

He said: “Nothing could be further from the truth - the exact opposite is the case.

“What was going inside the headsets was a video of children playing soccer in some faraway place. You could look around and you could see the kids playing soccer around you and it was a shared experience with everyone in that place that would have been impossible [to] experience otherwise.”

Viewers of the fight were taken aback by Zuckerberg’s appearance, with many commenting that the tech boss was trying to appear “human” and attempting to fit into Volk’s team:

It’s not the only viral moment from the UFC event to concern Zuckerberg, as Georgian MMA fighter Merab Dvalishvili was spotted talking to him during his fight against Henry Cejudo, whom he had in a guillotine.

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