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Gabe Kidd takes a shot at Cody Rhodes, Jon Moxley amid NJPW Strong Openweight Title reign

Originally posted on ClutchPoints | By Matty Breisch | Last updated 5/22/24

Ever since Gabe Kidd became the NJPW Strong Openweight Champion, and even during the build-up to his highly anticipated match with Eddie Kingston at NJPW Resurgence, the “Young Bull” has been on an absolute roll on his one-man media tour, ingratiating himself within the IWC using his unique brand of boastful interactions with the greater wrestling world.

His latest target? Cody Rhodes, who will be making his return to Japan alongside the rest of WWE as part of a three-show WWE tour. Though the “American Nightmare” isn’t taking aim at NJPW or any of the promotion’s belts, Kidd still feels offended by the encroachment and vowed on social media to take Rhodes’ belt if he starts to mess around within his territory.

“Stay out of my territory before I slap you up and take your belt again,” Gabe Kidd declared on social media.

Pretty interesting stuff, right? You bet, but Rhodes wasn’t alone in catching strays from Kidd, as he decided to take aim at another AEW Dynamite OG in Jon Moxley, who currently holds the IWGP World Heavyweight Championship despite only being a part-timer in the promotion. Discussing the championship picture in an interview with Fightful, Kidd declared that Moxley is making the title into a joke, as it should be defended in Japan, not on Dynamite.

“If you’re going to be IWGP Champion, you stay in Japan,” Kidd told Fightful. “That’s how it’s always been. You talk about respect for this company and that title. Well, come here for a month. Oh, you can’t, you have a family at home, you have commitments in America? That’s a shame. I don’t give a f**k. If you’re the champion, you have a responsibility. With great power comes great responsibility. F**king deal with it.”

On paper, Kidd and Moxley probably won’t end up working matches together in NJPW, as they have very different belts and are in different divisions of the same promotion, but if the former keeps talking trash on the latter, it’s going to be hard for Hiroshi Tanahashi and company not to put the duo on opposite sides of the vs. symbol, especially if they want to turn the “Young Bull” into a certified star worthy of headlining shows and getting fans to tune in on Pay-Per-View now that Jay White, Will Ospreay, and Kazuchika Okada are all gone.

STAY OUT OF MY TERRITORY BEFORE I SLAP YOU UP AND TAKE YOUR BELT

AGAIN https://t.co/NVWVJbGycq pic.twitter.com/a4FHab2TsO

— GABE KIDD (@GabeKidd0115) May 21, 2024

Jon Moxley tells everyone – including Gabe Kidd? – to get off Twitter.

Sitting down for an interview with RJ City on the special 100th episode of Hey EW!, Jon Moxley commented on the pervasive nature of Twitter, a social media platform that plenty of wrestlers use to make matches and even helped to spurn on the original All In back in 2018. While some people may enjoy the application, Moxley does not, as he feels as though it brings out the worst in people.

“Yeah, I don’t like Twitter at all. It’s hard to escape it. Because everything that’s in the news about any subject is about something somebody said or did on Twitter. So I’m going to hear about it. It’s impossible to escape,” Jon Moxley told RJ City via Fightful. “Or if it’s not Twitter, it’s something else. But I feel like Twitter particularly is just like, it brings the worst out of everyone. It’s the worst version of everyone, it’s the worst way for people to interact. It’s terrible. I think people are already dead. I think everyone should just drop it. I’ll keep it for emergencies. Just in case, you know, I get a… Say I get lost, or something, and my only communication to the world is like, here are my coordinates, somebody find me, or if for some reason I need to say something to the world, you know, it could be useful, and I don’t want anybody to steal it and start pretending to be me, so I keep it. But people try to be like, oh man, can you put this up, or can you promote this? If I do it for one person, I have to do it for everybody. I think my advice to the entire world would be get off that thing. Take it off your phone. Throw it in the garbage. We don’t need Twitter.”

Whoa, could this be a shot at Gabe Kidd, who you literally just saw take a shot at Cody Rhodes on the platform earlier in this very story? Maybe yes, maybe no but considering he was in the middle of an interveiw with RJ City at the time, it’s hard to imagine Moxley’s mind was on a 27-year-old member of Bullet Club looking to jump the line for a shot at the biggest prize in NJPW, even if that would have been an awesome troll job.