Elon Musk joked he wants to buy drinks giant Coca-Cola to ‘put the cocaine back in’ as the eccentric entrepreneur enjoyed a series of back-and-forths with Twitter users amid his $44billion takeover of the platform.
‘Next I’m buying Coca-Cola to put the cocaine back in,’ the wisecracking Tesla and SpaceX founder said in a late-night tweet Wednesday.
The tweet prompted a storm of amusing responses, including one post which implored Elon ‘bring it back’ and shared an image of what appeared to be one of the first publicly sold Coca-Cola bottles in 1894.
The early recipe for Coca-Cola actually included coca leaves, from which popular party drug cocaine is derived.
The original Coca-Cola is thought to have contained 3.5 milligrams of cocaine – an ingredient which remained present in the drink until it was removed by the company nine years later.
Elon also traded jokes with a user who posted a doctored tweet alongside Elon’s profile picture which read: ‘Now I’m going to buy McDonalds and fix all the ice cream machines…’
‘Listen, I can’t do miracles, ok,’ the billionaire entrepreneur responded.
witter users delighted in Elon’s coke-joke, before he followed up: ‘Beats the hell out of Red Bull!’
Twitter’s board on Monday unanimously accepted a $44billion bid from Musk to buy out the company and own it outright.
Musk pledged to uphold free speech on the platform so it can fulfil its potential as the world’s ‘digital town square’, while relaxing content restrictions and cracking down on spam posters and bots.
\
‘Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated,’ Musk said in a statement following the announcement of his takeover.
But news of the buyout prompted many left-leaning users to announce their intentions to leave the platform, while others expressed concern that relaxed content controls could lead to more hate speech.
In yet more tweets last night and early this morning, Elon set out some more of his intentions for the platform which outlined his basic visions for the user experience, a desire to make Twitter politically neutral in its content control, and the need for increased security.
Coca-Cola is one of the world’s best-loved brands and its refreshing, if unhealthy, fizzy brown beverage is enjoyed by millions every day.
But when chemist John Stith Pemberton created the original Coca-Cola formula in 1886 in a pharmacy in Atlanta, Georgia, he labelled it a ‘brain tonic’.
The first Coca-Cola advertisements positioned the concoction as a cure for ‘Morphine, Opium Habits and Desire for Intoxicants’.
But ironically, the two ingredients from which Pemberton’s soda drink derived its name were highly addictive.
The early versions of Coca-Cola contained kola nut powder to deliver a caffeine kick, and coca leaf extract which contained trace quantities of cocaine – around 3.5 milligrams per bottle until 1903, when it was removed.
Other ingredients contained in the original recipe were sugar syrup spiced with citric acid, nutmeg, vanilla and Chinese cinnamon oil.
However, the high levels of caffeine in Coca-Cola remained until the end of World War One.
By 1908, anti-drug campaigners began attacking America’s growing dependence on the substance and started calling for a national ban.
One Texan politician declared in 1909: ‘The reason they put this dope in Coca-Cola is to create a constant craving for more and thus sell the drink.’
Coca-Cola remained steadfast and continued to caffeinate its beverages until World War I sent prices through the roof due to shortages.
In 1918, Coca-Cola halved the quotient to today’s levels – a can now contains about half the caffeine of a shot of espresso.
