Mark Zuckerberg Wins His First BJJ Tournament

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta Platforms and the founder of Facebook, has competed in a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu (BJJ) tournament for the first time and actually won two medals – one gold and one silver.

“Competed in my first jiu-jitsu tournament and won some medals for the Guerrilla Jiu-Jitsu team,” the 38-year-old tech billionaire said in -what else- a Facebook post.

Zuckerberg also thanked his trainers Dave Camarillo, Khai Wu, and James Terry.

It is unclear where or when the tournament took place.

Mark Zuckerberg’s interest in BJJ

The Facebook boss snagged a pair of medals in both gi and no gi Jiu-Jitsu, in the white belt master 2 lightweight division of the tournament.

The team that he represented was founded and is currently run by veteran Judo and BJJ black belt Dave Camarillo.

In an episode of The Joe Rogan Experience podcast in late 2022, Zuckerberg had spoken about how he grew an interest in various sports, including mixed martial arts, during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Brazilian Jiu Jitsu developed from ancient Japanese technique

BJJ is a self-defence martial art and combat sport initially developed in 1925 by Brazilian brothers Carlos, Oswaldo, Gastão Jr., George, and Hélio Gracie, after Carlos was taught the original Japanese Jiu Jitsu by a travelling Japanese judoka.

Its technique revolves around the concept that a smaller, weaker person can successfully defend themselves against a bigger, stronger, heavier opponent by using leverage and weight distribution, taking the fight to the ground and using a number of holds and submissions to defeat them. It can prove very useful in self-defense situations.

Brazilian Jiu Jitsu came to be its own defined combat sport through the innovations, practices, and adaptation of Gracie Jiu Jitsu and Judo, and became an essential martial art for modern mixed martial arts, rising in popularity worldwide.

Mark Zuckerberg gets praised by Conor McGregor

This is not the first time we see Mark Zuckerberg fighting. Recently, a video on his social media showed him training with MMA fighter Khai Wu, and it quickly went viral.

Furthermore, UFC champion Conor McGregor praised the 38-year-old Meta Platforms CEO for his impressive MMA skills during sparring.

Zuckerberg turns to AI

On February 24, Meta announced the launch of LLaMA, which stands for Long Language Model Meta AI. It is the foundational software for a new artificial intelligence system that mines massive amounts of text to generate summaries and content.

Mark Zuckerberg posted on his Facebook profile the following: “Today we’re releasing a new state-of-the-art AI large language model called LLaMA designed to help researchers advance their work. LLMs have shown a lot of promise in generating text, having conversations, summarizing written material, and more complicated tasks like solving math theorems or predicting protein structures. Meta is committed to this open model of research, and we’ll make our new model available to the AI research community.”