Mark Zuckerberg and Merab Dvalishvili have taken their unlikely friendship somewhere new: the middle of Lake Tahoe. The Meta CEO and UFC bantamweight contender squared off in a sparring session on a barge floating on the lake, and based on the footage, neither of them held back on having fun with it.
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“Back on the barge with @merab.dvalishvili. Round 2,” Mark Zuckerberg captioned the video as he shared it on social media.
Merab matched the energy from the jump.
“Round 2 with Mark Zuckerberg. Machine vs. Machine,” he said as the clip began.
The session was anything but a simple handshake and smile appearance.The two traded punches and kicks for real, and at one point Merab lifted Zuckerberg clean off his feet and hauled him across the barge. Priscilla Chan even paddled by on a kayak mid-session, visibly confused by her husband’s shirtless state.
“Merab make me take my shirt off because it looks more ‘fighter,’” Zuckerberg told his wife.
By the end, Merab seemed just as into it as his billionaire training partner.
“Let’s do this every day,” he told Mark Zuckerberg.
This is the second documented sparring session between the two, following a gym session in December 2025 that happened to fall right after Merab lost his bantamweight title to Petr Yan in a closely contested rematch, with a trilogy fight between them expected sometime next year. Former champion Aljamain Sterling was on hand for that first session and praised Zuckerberg afterward for staying composed against elite pressure. Zuckerberg has taken his MMA hobby seriously since picking up jiu-jitsu during the pandemic, training with fighters like Alex Pereira, Alexander Volkanovski, and Israel Adesanya along the way, and even flirted with the idea of a Colosseum showdown with Elon Musk that never actually happened.
That history is part of why fans took this new footage seriously enough to start picking apart every detail of it.
Fans want a Mark Zuckerberg vs. Jonah Hill clash
Some of the loudest reactions weren’t about Zuckerberg at all. They were about whether Merab was really trying.
“Merab could’ve ended that in five seconds. My G sold out,” one fan wrote. Another added, “Merab took a dive as if Mark Zuckerberg could take him down like that.”
Others turned their attention to Zuckerberg’s technique itself. “Zuck, bless his nerdy uncoordinated little heart has no natural striking talent,” one comment read, while another simply noted, “That’s not how to do it.”
The clip also revived a completely different matchup fans have wanted for a while: Zuckerberg against Jonah Hill. The idea gained new life after an old clip of Hill resurfaced this month, from an April appearance on the SmartLess podcast alongside Jason Bateman, Sean Hayes, and Will Arnett, where Hill talked up his years of Brazilian jiu-jitsu training.
“I love Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, except my body is begging me not to love it,” Hill said. “My wife is often like, ‘You’re not going to become a professional fighter. You know that, right? You’re a comedian.'”
When Bateman asked what he’d do if the two of them actually fought, Hill didn’t hesitate.
“I would f— you up. I would f— all three of you up,” he said.
Fans connected the dots fast. “Jonah Hill would f— both of them up,” one wrote, referencing Zuckerberg and Merab together. Another simply suggested, “He should fight Jonah Hill next.”
Whether any of it happens is beside the point for now. Zuckerberg has found a genuine hobby in this, and with Merab openly pushing for daily sessions and a trilogy fight against Yan already on his own calendar for next year, the barge sparring looks like the start of a running bit rather than a one-off.
