After buying Twitter for a record $44 billion, Tesla CEO, Elon Musk has promised to buy Coca-Cola and ‘put the cocaine back in.’
The billionaire businessman disclosed this via his Twitter handle in the early hours of Thursday posting, saying, “Next I’m buying Coca-Cola to put the cocaine back in”
Coca-Cola, leading soft drinks producer, at one point, used coca leaves, with cocaine present in them, when the ingredient was still considered medicinal in the nineteenth century.
However, as the drug became stigmatised and Prohibition hit the US, cocaine was removed from their secret formula and instead replaced with decocainised coca leaves.
Musk’s tweet is perhaps a joke, though not wholly discernable, given his history of acting on his whimsical social media statements.
But it is a nod to the veteran beverage company’s colourful history with cocaine. Coca Cola’s eponymous trademark soft drink is named for its two primary ingredients: coca leaves and kola nuts. While kola nuts are a source of caffeine, coca leaves are the base from which the psychoactive drug cocaine is extracted.
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The world’s richest man had, after acquiring Twitter for $44 billion in a bizarre hostile takeover on Monday, posted a screenshot of a previous tweet where he said “Now I’m going to buy McDonald’s and fix all the ice cream machines,” and jokingly responded to himself with “Listen I can’t do miracles ok”.
Musk, known for his outlandish statements, already has a reputation on Twitter. He had, in the past, polled Twitter users, asking if he should sell 10% of his Tesla stock in order to pay for unrealized capital gains, following which he has actually sold off nearly $7 billion in Tesla shares when over 57% of poll participants voted in favour of his suggestion.
In the weeks leading up to his Twitter takeover, when Musk was only set to join the board and nothing else, the Tesla founder tweeted a series of ideas that he believed could improve the platform, with some appearing serious — like the possibility of introducing an edit button — while others seemed wholly bizarre, such as turning Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters into a homeless shelter.
