Elon Musk challenges Vladimir Putin to a fight for Ukraine

SpaceX and Tesla founder tweets challenge at Kremlin official account

Elon Musk has seemingly challenged Vladimir Putin to a fight for Ukraine.

“I hereby challenge Vladimir Putin to single combat,” he tweeted, using the Russian alphabet to write Mr Putin’s name.

“Stakes are Ukraine,” he continued, writing the country’s name in its own language.

In a follow-up tweet, Mr Musk then posted a whole message in Russian. “Do you agree to this fight?”, he wrote, tagging the Kremlin’s official English language Twitter account.

Mr Musk then replied to another Twitter user who suggested that the Russian president would easily win any fight.

“If Putin could so easily humiliate the west, then he would accept the challenge,” Mr Musk wrote. “But he will not.”

Mr Musk has taken an active role in the ongoing war between Ukraine and Russia, both on his Twitter feed and through his companies. He has mocked Russian officials on social media, as well as providing Starlink space internet equipment to Ukraine.

The tweet came after a number of bizarre posts by Mr Musk over the morning.

In the hour before that post, he had written “By the pricking of my thumbs”, an apparent reference to Macbeth – a lien that is followed by the phrase “something wicked this way comes”.

And shortly before that, he had posted “There is a beauty to the biological substrate”. It was not clear what he meant, but the phrase is used in neuroscience and psychology – something in which Mr Musk has an interest, through his startup Neuralink.

Elon Musk’s posts on Twitter have caused him and his companies trouble in the past. Mr Musk has said that he “was always crazy” on the site, and said in an interview that he saw the site as a “war zone”.

Previous posts have included one reading “Tesla stock price is too high imo”, which wiped $14 billion off the value of the company, and another commitment to sell “almost all physical possessions” and to “own no house”.

Those controversial tweets have led to a run of legal issues, including lawsuits from the US Securities and Exchange Commission as well as from one of the divers involved in the rescue of children who were stuck in a cave in Thailand.