Elon Musk asks again to fight Putin for Ukraine – in even more bizarre tweets

SpaceX founder jokes that Russian space agency chief is a ‘tough negotiator’ and tells Putin to ‘bring his bear’

Elon Musk tagged the Kremlin in a tweet challenging Mr Putin to ‘single combat’ (Brian Lawless/PA) (PA Archive)

Elon Musk has challenged Vladimir Putin to a fight once again – in a series of even more bizarre tweets.

On Wednesday, Mr Musk challenged the Russian president 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.

Now, the Tesla and SpaceX chief executive has sparred with Dmitry Rogozin, the head of Russia’s space agency, in a new series of posts.

After Mr Musk posted the challenge, Mr Rogozin posted lines from Alexander Pushkin’s poem ‘Tale of the pope and of his workman Balda’.

“You, little devil, are but young and frail,” Mr 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!”

Mr Musk then responded with a photoshopped picture of Putin riding a bear, alongside a photograph of himself using Tesla’s flamethrower, and a joke about the money that would be charged to watch the fight.

In a follow-up post, he joked about that bear.

Mr Rogozin and Mr Musk, as well as their respective organisations Roscosmos and SpaceX, have a history of trading insults on social media and competition in real life.

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.

SpaceX and other private US companies are looking to bring those capabilities back to the US with the development of new rocket technology such as that Falcon 9.