Not content to battle it out in the boardroom, crypto bros, tech executives and start-up founders have embraced an old-fashioned version of masculinity.
Walking into the crowded hotel conference room, Andrew Batey looked like any other tech guy attending ETHDenver, an annual cryptocurrency conference. A venture capital investor based in Florida, Mr. Batey wore a black sweatshirt emblazoned with the logos of more than a dozen crypto companies, with names like LunarCrush and bitSmiley. He had arrived in town with some expensive footwear — a pair of Off-White Air Jordans, the type of sneaker, he said, that people usually don’t take out of the box.
Mr. Batey, however, was at the conference not to network with fellow crypto enthusiasts but to fight one of them — live on YouTube. At the hotel, a short drive from the conference convention center, he was preparing for his official weigh-in, the final step before a fight the next evening in an arena packed with crypto colleagues. Under the watchful eye of a representative from the Colorado Combative Sports Commission, Mr. Batey, 40, stripped down to his boxers, which were adorned with a cartoon Santa Claus riding a golf cart.
He weighed in at just under 195 pounds, on target for the fight. The bare-chested venture capitalist raised his biceps and flexed for the cameras.
The nation’s tech elite, not content with unfathomable wealth and rising political influence in Washington, have recently developed a new obsession — fighting. Across the United States, men like Mr. Batey are learning to punch, kick, knee, elbow and, in some cases, hammer an opponent over the head with their fists. The figurehead of the movement is Mark Zuckerberg, the billionaire chief executive of Meta, who has charted his impressive physical transformation from skinny computer nerd to martial arts fighter on Instagram, one of the apps he owns. A recent post showed Mr. Zuckerberg, dressed in gym shorts and an American flag T-shirt, grappling his opponent to the ground.
The tech industry’s newfound devotion to martial arts is one facet of a broader cultural shift that has upended U.S. politics. Many of these tech founders turned fighters are chasing a testosterone-heavy ideal of masculinity that is ascendant on social media and embraced by President Trump. An enthusiastic practitioner of Brazilian jujitsu, Mr. Zuckerberg, 40, lamented this year that corporate culture was getting “neutered” and was devoid of “masculine energy.” In 2023, Mr. Zuckerberg’s fellow billionaire Elon Musk, a longtime corporate rival, challenged him to a televised cage match. The fight never took place, though Mr. Musk suggested at one point that he was willing to do battle in the Roman Colosseum.