Mark Zuckerberg undergoes surgery for knee injury during martial arts training

Meta Platforms Inc. Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg underwent surgery following a knee injury he sustained during a mixed martial arts session. In a post on Instagram, Zuckerberg said he tore a knee ligament while training mixed martial arts. The 39-year-old is taking training for a “competitive MMA fight early next year.”

“Tore my ACL sparring and just got out of surgery to replace it,” Zuckerberg wrote in the caption of a post with a series of photos showing him in a hospital bed, his knee bandaged and in a brace.

Zuckerberg took up MMA during the pandemic. Since then, his involvement has moved past casual, having built an octagonal fighting ring in his backyard. In May, Zuckerberg earned gold and silver medals at his first Brazilian jiu-jitsu competition at Woodside High School on the Peninsula.

Last month, the billionaire posted a photo of himself with two black eyes and a bruised nose, noting that “sparring got a little out of hand.”

During the summer of this year, Zuckerberg and Tesla CEO Elon Musk agreed to a cage match following a heated exchange between the two tech billionaires on social media.

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Weeks later, Zuckerberg said Musk “isn’t serious” about the fight and that it was “time to move on”.

“If Elon ever gets serious about a real date and official event, he knows how to reach me. Otherwise, time to move on. I’m going to focus on competing with people who take the sport seriously,” Zuckerberg said on his Threads social platform in August.

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Meta spends handsomely on Zuckerberg’s security. The company planned to increase its pretax spending on Zuckerberg’s personal security to $14 million this year, up from $10 million annually, Bloomberg reported citing data from the company’s February regulatory filing. That amount doesn’t include other security expenses the company accrues on Zuckerberg’s behalf, the report added.

The founder of Facebook, the social media company that was renamed Meta, is known for setting the overall strategy for the business and getting deeply involved in efforts like artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and the metaverse.