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Elon Musk jokes about buying Coca-Cola, putting ‘cocaine’ back in the popular drink

Johanna Chisholm
·3-min read

Prospective Twitter owner Elon Musk is famous for peppering his highly active account on the platform with lighthearted jests alongside posts sharing serious stock acquisitions.

Now the billionaire entrepreneur, in the wake of agreeing to buy Twitter for $44bn, has stirred up his followers by posting a tweet that has led many to draw a blank: is he seriously considering buying Coca-Cola or just trolling his more than 80 million followers?

On Wednesday night, the world’s richest person took to the social media platform to suggest, or joke, that his next multinational conquest would be none other than Coca-Cola, one of the world’s largest beverage companies.

“Next I’m buying Coca-Cola to put the cocaine back in,” the Tesla owner wrote, making a sly reference to the company’s founding years when it would reportedly sell a bottle containing approximately 3.5 grams of cocaine.

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Though many took the SpaceX founder’s tweet to fall along the ‘joke’ side of his online persona, there was a time when Mr Musk’s tweets about buying Twitter, a transaction that still requires approval from shareholders, were also considered to be not serious until earlier this week when the deal was announced.

Purchasing a company like Coca-Cola, one of the largest beverage companies in the world with a market capitalization of $283.94bn, is a much different ballpark than Musk’s recent purchase of Twitter, whose own market capitalization sits at $37.14bn.

One of Musk’s followers pointed out as much, noting that after the transaction with the San Francisco-based company goes through, he’d be “too poor” to afford the multinational beverage company.

“Elon, you are too poor to buy Coca-Cola,” wrote Fintwit, a popular finance account, while sharing a screenshot of the company’s stock prices, listed on Thursday at $65.56 (in Musk’s agreement with Twitter, he offered to pay ​​out $54.20 cash per share).

Later that night, the Tesla titan conceded that there were indeed limits to his takeovers.

While sharing a photoshopped tweet that claimed the richest man in the world had his eyes set on buying McDonald’s next, in order to “fix all of the ice cream machines”, Musk captioned it with a tongue-in-cheek response: “Listen, I can’t do miracles OK.”

The original tweet, which has now garnered more than 2.9 million likes and hundreds of thousands of retweets, was filled with commenters offering up more ideas of companies that the tech billionaire could ‘fix’.

Fox I want another season of ‘Firefly’,” wrote Shibetoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of bitcoin.

“Some sci-fi that actually features sci-fi would be great,” Musk quipped back.

Others offered up more outlandish and some more serious options, including Google, various countries’ foreign debt and even world hunger, a problem that Musk has tweeted about solving before when he trolled the United Nations to show him a plan.