Shares of English soccer club Manchester United Plc briefly rose as much as 17% in premarket trading on Wednesday, after Elon Musk jokingly tweeted “Also, I’m buying Manchester United, welcome.”
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Shares of English soccer club Manchester United briefly rose as much as 17% in premarket trading on Wednesday, after Tesla CEO Elon Musk jokingly tweeted that he would buy the club.
“Also, I’m buying Manchester United, welcome,” said the billionaire he wrote on Twitter. Hours later, Musk responded to a Twitter user asking if he was serious about buying the club and clarified that it was a joke.
“No, this is a long running joke on Twitter. I don’t buy any sports equipment,” he said. he tweetedbefore adding: “Although, if it was any team, it would be Man U. They were my favorite team as a kid.”
Shares of Manchester United, which trade under the ticker MANU on the New York Stock Exchange, were up 3.68% in premarket trading at 4:30 a.m. ET, paring gains after initially rising 17% after the tweet.
Based on the club’s most recent stock market valuation, buying Manchester United would have cost Musk about $2 billion. Manchester United declined to comment on the matter when contacted by CNBC.
Musk’s original tweet sparked widespread backlash and had garnered more than 573,000 likes and been retweeted more than 140,000 times at the time of writing. Manchester United fans reacted with surprise, but hope, as many have criticized the club’s current owners, the American Glazer family.
This is linked to the club’s slow start to the current season in the English Premier League, with two defeats in two games, and the club being part of last year’s failed attempt to mount the European Super League.
Even before Musk clarified that his offer to buy Manchester United was a joke, some fans remained skeptical, as the billionaire has a history of making similar jokes online.
In April this year, he he tweeted that he would buy Coca-Cola “to put the cocaine back in”, a tweet he referred to on Wednesday after clarifying that he would not be buying Manchester United.
“And I’m not buying Coca-Cola to put cocaine back in, despite the extreme popularity of that movement,” Musk said. he wrote.
The original tweet about the Coca-Cola purchase came just days after Twitter’s board accepted Musk’s offer to buy the social media company for $44 billion.
Musk has since gone back on that deal just four months after agreeing to it. Twitter is taking the billionaire to court over the dispute.
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