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Elon Musk at the opening of a Tesla factory in Texas
Photo: SUZANNE CORDEIRO / AFP
After the global outcry surrounding his attempt to take over Twitter, multi-billionaire Elon Musk appears to have finally lost his grip on reality.
On the social network, for which he's willing to pay $44 billion -- much of it borrowed money -- he wrote Thursday, "Next I'm going to buy Coca-Cola and put cocaine back in it."
Within hours, his tweet became the second most liked tweet in Twitter history.
By Friday noon, around 4.4 million users had given it a »heart«.
He was retweeted more than 660,000 times and quoted more than 170,000 times.
So far, only the announcement of the death of actor Chadwick Boseman, which was distributed via his own account, has caused more reactions on Twitter.
Musk's comment that he wanted to add cocaine back into the dark sugar soda may refer to the fact that cocaine was actually added to the drink up until 1906.
At that time, the soda was advertised as a panacea instead of as a refreshing drink.
According to the German Center for Addiction Questions, adding the drug to drinks and over-the-counter medicines was not banned in the United States until 1914.
Previously, there had been many reports of cocaine-related deaths.
Musk gave the impression that he had a rather casual relationship with drugs in 2018 when he hit a joint and drank whiskey during a live podcast lasting several hours.
But three years later he also said: "I think drugs make you age faster." As so often, the Tesla boss leaves an ambivalent impression.
But even if he were serious about buying the beverage company to drug its flagship drink, he probably wouldn't have the resources to do so.
As the US magazine "Time" calculates, the Coca-Cola group is currently worth 284 billion dollars.
Even Elon Musk with a fortune of 253 billion dollars is not rich enough for that.
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