Last month, a referee halted a Brazilian jiu-jitsu competition after he decided one of the opponents—Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg—had gone unconscious.
Now Zuckerberg, his coach, and his nearly $700 billion company are stepping in to dispute that referee’s call.
The episode, which took place last month during a match in California, appears in a recent New York Times article examining Zuckerberg’s intense new workout regimen and his foray into martial arts. The referee who officiated the match said he intervened after Zuckerberg started to snore, a sign that he was out cold.
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But Meta is pushing back on that version of events, arguing that Zuckerberg never went unconscious in his opponent’s chokehold.
“At no point during the competition was Mark knocked unconscious,” Elana Widmann, a spokesperson for Meta, said in an email to The Daily Beast. “That never happened.”
Widmann also claimed a Meta spokesperson attending the competition and witnessed an exchange in which the referee “apologized to Mark and his coach after the match for prematurely calling the match.”
After the Times story’s publication, Zuckerberg’s jiu-jitsu coach reached out to Joseph Bernstein, The New York Times reporter behind the story, and argued the referee had misheard.
The coach, Dave Camarillo, told Bernstein that Zuckerberg’s snores were really just “effortful grunting,” Bernstein said in a tweet.
Brazilian jiu-jitsu is a grappling-heavy martial art in which fighters try to take their opponent to the ground and force them into submission, often by placing them in a chokehold. When he’s not trying to build his leg-free virtual reality world, Zuckerberg has been experimenting with the sport.
In an interview with podcaster and martial arts commentator Joe Rogan, Zuckerberg said he began training in combat sports during the pandemic.
“There’s just something that’s so primal about it,” Zuckerberg told Rogan in his podcast appearance.
Even if Zuckerberg got a bad call from the referee, he didn’t do too bad in his first jiu-jitsu event, by all accounts. He reportedly took home two medals and won a match against another opponent, an engineer for Uber.
