Ukraine war: Russian space boss slams ‘weakling’ Elon Musk, who challenged Vladimir Putin to a fight on Twitter
- Eccentric billionaire Musk took to Twitter, where his messages are notoriously erratic
- ‘I hereby challenge Vladimir Putin to single combat. Stakes are Ukraine’
Global leaders around the world have condemned Russia’s President Vladimir Putin over his decision to invade Ukraine, but Elon Musk is taking it one step further in challenging the Russian leader to a one-on-one fight.
“I hereby challenge Vladimir Putin to single combat. Stakes are Ukraine,” Musk tweeted Monday morning, with Putin’s name and Ukraine written in Cyrillic script.
In a follow-up tweet, the world’s richest man then tagged Putin’s official Twitter account and wrote in Russian: “Do you agree to this fight?”
When one of Musk’s 77 million followers wrote that the Tesla founder might not have thought his challenge through, Musk said he was “absolutely serious”.
“If Putin could so easily humiliate the west, then he would accept the challenge. But he will not,” he added.
There was no immediate reaction from the Kremlin. But Dmitry Rogozin, director general of Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, responded by calling Musk a “weakling” and “little devil”.