Tesla CEO Elon Musk joked that he would buy up the Coca-Cola Company after his high-profile purchase of Twitter, vowing to bring back an infamous – and now highly illegal – ingredient once contained in the drink.
Musk, who’s known for his social media antics and trollish posts, took to Twitter late on Wednesday night to ‘announce’ plans to buy the multi-billion dollar beverage corporation.
“Next I’m buying Coca-Cola to put the cocaine back in,” he said, playing on an increasingly popular meme instigated by his $44 billion purchase of Twitter earlier this week.
While the soft drink has since become one of the most globally recognized American cultural exports, its original formula contained some questionable ingredients, chief among them cocaine. According to Scientific American, the soda still features the extract of coca leaves – from which the illicit white power is derived – but only after they have been “de-cocainized.”
It’s unclear exactly when the Coca-Cola company removed the drug from its products, though it was likely sometime after the firm was purchased from the drink’s inventor, John Pemberton (himself a lifelong morphine user), in the late 1880s.