Elon Musk is no stranger to bizarre behavior on Twitter–but his recent tweets ridiculing Russian president Vladimir Putin may be his wildest yet.
The world’s richest man–who created Tesla and PayPal, launched SpaceX and –is apparently challenging Putin to hand-to-hand combat of Ukrainians, who are currently enduring a bloody invasion by Russian military forces.
Musk recently activated Starlink internet satellites over Ukraine to improve internet connectivity. Now he’s challenging Putin to fight in “single combat,” saying that the stakes would be Ukraine.
He tagged the official Kremlin Twitter account in one of the posts, asking in Russian whether it would “agree to this fight.” He is yet to receive any official response from the Russian government.
Musk also sparred with Dmitry Rogozin, the head of Russia’s space agency, in a new series of tweets.
After Musk posted the challenge, Rogozin responded by sharing lines from Alexander Pushkin’s poem, Tale of the Pope and of his Workman Balda, reports the U.K. Independent.
“You, little devil, are but young and frail,” Rogozin quoted, in Russian. “Do you compete with me? you will only fail; It is time and work wasted for you; Beat my brother, and you will see!”
Musk then responded with a photoshopped picture of a shirtless Putin riding a bear, alongside a photo of himself using his Boring Company’s limited edition flamethrower, and a joke about the pay-per-view money that would be charged to watch the fight.
In a follow up post, Musk cracked, “He can even bring his bear.”
While some critics may feel that Musk’s’ tongue-in-cheek Putin tweets are perhaps in bad taste given the very real suffering being endured by the Ukrainian people, the SpaceX mogul has a history of clashing with Rogozin and Russia’s space agency on social media, the Independent reports.
When Russia cut off sales of rocket engines to the US, Mr Rogozin joked that the country would have to fly to space on “broomsticks”. That then led Mr Musk and SpaceX to joke that it was happy making “American broomsticks” as it celebrated the successful launch of one of its Falcon 9 rockets.
Some of that competition comes because, for years, the US and Nasa have depended on Russian space capabilities to launch its astronauts to the International Space Station and for other missions.
In related Russia/Musk news, the Florida college student who made headlines for tracking Musk’s private jet on Twitter recently set his sights on tracking the yachts of Russian oligarchs, who are increasingly seeing their assets seized by western nations enforcing anti-Russian sanctions.