Social media users cannot stop talking about who would win in a hypothetical fight between 100 human men and one gorilla.
The viral question has dominated conversations across TikTok, X and Reddit since mid-April, as internet users either try to argue their stance or create memes inspired by the discourse.
We tracked down the origins of this debate and asked an expert to weigh in to try to answer the question once and for all.
What’s behind this debate?
This is not the first time this hypothetical matchup has been debated online. It seems to have originated in 2020 in a question posted in the Who Would Win? subreddit, a section on Reddit dedicated to discussing who would win in various theoretical fights.
The question went viral again on TikTok in February 2022 and then resurfaced in early 2025, according to Know Your Meme, a site dedicated to documenting and explaining various internet memes.
The trend has since escalated to the point where people have built virtual simulators of 100 men fighting a single gorilla to see who would come out on top.
Major online personalities such as Jimmy Donaldson, aka MrBeast, YouTube’s most famous creator, have chimed in, introducing the debate to millions of people. Donaldson jokingly suggested he would make a YouTube video answering the question for his 32 million X followers. In response, X owner Elon Musk, who has over 219 million followers, replied, “Sure, what’s the worst that could happen?”
So, who would win? An expert weighs in.
In an effort to put this debate to rest (without orchestrating a fight between a hundred men and a gorilla, of course), Yahoo News turned to Tara Stoinski, the president, CEO and chief scientific officer for the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund.
Stoinski, who has studied gorillas for more than 30 years, said she’s received a number of inquiries from friends and other news outlets trying to get an answer to this very question. She told Yahoo News she wasn’t necessarily surprised by social media’s interest in this particular question because “a question that gets asked all the time is how much stronger are gorillas than people.”
“[Gorillas] are much stronger than us, not only in their physical body strength — they’ve got all that upper body strength, particularly the males,” Stoinski said. “They’re the largest primate on the planet, but also they’ve got these massive heads and jaws and jaw muscles, so they’re really strong biters — and all of this is in defense.”
By “in defense,” Stoinski explains that gorillas are vegetarians, so their strong muscles and jaws are used for protection rather than hunting.
So, what does Stoinski think? Could a single gorilla take on 100 men? According to her, no. The humans would likely win, she said.
“The male gorilla comes in with all of his size and strength, 400 pounds of pure muscle, incredible jaw strength, just a very intimidating demeanor,” she said. “I think, though, that in this case, it’s a numbers game. With 100 men coming after one gorilla, they just have a lot of strategies that they could use to wear the gorilla down, to tire them out. They can coordinate their behavior; they can take turns.”
It wouldn’t necessarily be a seamless win for the humans, though.
“He’d probably take out a number of humans in the fight; they wouldn’t go unscathed,” Stoinski said. “I think that the numbers just work in the human’s favor.”
While some may be surprised that humans could defeat a gorilla in a fight, Stoinski is more surprised by the notion that a gorilla would instinctively do anything to harm a group of humans in the first place.
“In this dialogue that’s going on around gorillas fighting humans, I think one of the things that’s missed is that gorillas are [nicknamed] ‘gentle giant,’” Stoinski said. “More often than not, they’re very gentle animals.”
