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Elon Musk and Jack Ma matched wits publicly for the first time. And boy, they didn’t disappoint.

An onstage debate between China’s richest man and the Tesla Inc. boss left a largely Chinese audience both awestruck and dumbfounded as the pair sparred over everything from the existence of aliens to the preservation of human consciousness. Musk, alternating between tech visionary and larger-than-life Bond villain, argued that AI will soon surpass the human race; that civilization may end and hence humankind needed to explore the cosmos (specifically Mars); and that people are essentially dumb creatures circumscribed by genes.

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But Musk, who appeared discombobulated at times following a late trans-Pacific flight, met his match in a fellow billionaire who parried him at every turn. The Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. co-founder espoused a focus on life on Earth and argued that machines will never surpass their makers. Ma, the more polished and down-to-earth speaker, also invoked familiar stances on education and the need for “Love-Q” or LQ in addition to IQ to survive the future. But overall, the Alibaba honcho came across as more reasonable than the erratic Musk, who several times trailed off into poorly articulated tangents such as the timeline of civilization or pace of technological change (“It does seem like a long time… Is that good or bad? I dunno.”)