Facebook founder and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently revealed how he tried to hide his identity when he competed in a BJJ tournament for the first time. The social media giant has been in love with MMA and BJJ for several years now, but it was always going to be tough for someone in his position to actually compete in relative peace. He isn’t the first celebrity to test themselves in competition of course, and there’s always a fair amount of attention when anyone does. It appears as though Zuckerberg wanted to limit that as much as possible, and he actually went to pretty big lengths to do so.
Zuckerberg competed in his first BJJ tournament back in 2023 and although the news went viral afterwards, his plans to avoid attention on the day worked pretty well. He recently appeared on an episode of The Joe Rogan Experience and explained how he went about it:
“I guess I rolled into this tournament and I registered under my first and middle names so people didn’t know who I was. I had like sunglasses and a hat, and I wore a COVID mask. It wasn’t until they called our names to stop onto the mat that I was like, ‘All right,’ took all the stuff off, and the guy [was] like, ‘Uh, what?’ I think he was trying to figure out what was going on.”
Although it worked well, Mark Zuckerberg couldn’t hide his identity forever and after the first match of his first BJJ tournament was over it had become obvious:
“Afterwards, his coach was like, ‘I think that was Mark Zuckerberg who just submitted me,’ and the coach is like, ‘No. No way.’ (The other guy) was like, ‘No, I think that was.’ The coach was like, ‘What? You’re fighting Mark Zuckerberg? Get back in there, go fight him,’ and he was like, ‘No, he just submitted me.’”
The full interview with Mark Zuckerberg where he talks about hiding his identity at his first BJJ tournament was uploaded to the official YouTube channel of The Joe Rogan Experience:
