Elon Musk said on Twitter on Wednesday that he wants to buy Coca-Cola to “put the cocaine back in” the beverage.
Musk’s tweet came two days after the billionaire paid $44 billion for Twitter. He tweeted less than an hour after announcing his ambitions for the beverage company, “Let’s make Twitter maximum fun!”
While Musk’s remarks regarding Coca-Cola were most likely made in jest, they are historically accurate.
When John Pemberton, an Atlanta pharmacist, first brewed cocaine in 1885, it was lawful, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse.
Pemberton’s recipe at the time comprised a cocaine extract made from coca leaves. He called the beverage a “patent medicine” as well as a “brain tonic and intellectual beverage.”
Coca-Cola was originally included in the drink, but it was removed by the 1900s, according to a 1988 New York Times story on the company.
A request for comment from Insider was not immediately returned by representatives for The Coca-Cola Company.
Musk’s popular Coca-Cola tweet inspired a retort from Rep. Lauren Boebert, who poked fun at Hunter Biden’s reported drug use. She wrote, “Has Hunter been asking you for favors?”
Since the announcement of Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, many of the platform’s users have given him suggestions for what firms he should buy next.
Musk responded to a Twitter user who suggested Musk “purchase Fox” in order to have a new season of the “Firefly” TV show greenlit, saying, “Some sci-fi that actually features sci-fi would be great.”
“@elonmusk should buy the History Channel and make it about history,” another Twitter user suggested, to which Musk responded with a laughing-crying emoji.
Since the takeover, Twitter’s user numbers have swung dramatically, with politically left-leaning accounts losing thousands of followers and right-wing accounts gaining tens of thousands.