UFC 314 saw an integration with Meta’s Threads platform in place of where viewers would typically see fan posts from Elon Musk’s X.
The Kaseya Center in Miami, Florida, saw a plethora of political attendees, including President Donald Trump but also Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, and Elon Musk.
With the X owner present in Musk, it certainly seemed like bad timing for the UFC to introduce a new integration with Threads, Mark Zuckerberg’s competitor to Musk’s platform.
Typically, posts from X are shown mid-fight to garner fan reaction or journalists’ opinions on how the fight should be scored. On Saturday, however, the social media posts were pulled from Threads instead.
The integration came less than two weeks after a Meta-UFC partnership was announced, focusing on innovation and content sharing.
‘Meta has the greatest minds in tech.’
According to ESPN, the two companies will work on ways to incorporate Meta’s augmented reality and Meta Glasses into UFC broadcasts.
White claimed that Meta is working on innovations for a new fighter ranking system; the UFC boss had long taken issue with some of the decisions made by media members who had influence on fighter rankings and announced last October that changes were coming.
“Meta has the greatest minds in tech and they are going to take fan engagement to the next level,” White said in a statement.
Zuckerberg added, “I love this sport and I’m looking forward to working with the UFC to let fans experience it in new ways.”
While no financial terms were disclosed, the partnership comes after an ever-growing relationship between the two entrepreneurs, which culminated in White being named to Meta’s board of directors in February.
White said at the time that he visited Zuckerberg for dinner in Lake Tahoe and was impressed by his decor and attitude.
“[I] walk into his living room of his house, and they put me in the living room to wait, and he’s got this American flag on the wall with 13 stars on it, and I’m like, ‘Off to a good start,’” White told Tucker Carlson.
White noted he was also impressed by Zuckerberg sporting the “biggest American flag you’ve ever seen” in his backyard over the lake.
White then recalled, “We sit down, we have dinner, and we probably talk for four hours, and I walked away from that first meeting liking Mark, and we started to create a relationship from there. We talked … and we became friends.”
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