Without that thread, I guess here is as good a place as any:
Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, tweeted that he was buying English football club Manchester United Plc, without offering any details.
“I’m buying Manchester United ur [sic] welcome,” Musk said in a tweet on Tuesday. The northern England-based team has more than 32 million followers on its main Twitter account and Musk’s tweet had garnered 220,000 ‘likes’ on the platform within two hours.
Musk’s post was a follow-on comment to a previous tweet: “To be clear, I support the left half of the Republican Party and the right half of the Democratic Party!” Left half and right half are football lineup positions.
The comment by the chief executive of electric car giant Tesla comes as United, champions of England a record 20 times, suffer a nightmare opening on the field to the 2022-2023 season.
One of the world’s best known and most widely supported teams, United are rooted at the bottom of the English Premier League after losing their first two games, having failed over the past two months to adequately rebuild a squad that performed comparatively poorly last season.
Its New York-listed shares have slid 24 percent over the last 12 months, valuing it at just more than $2bn.
Manchester United is controlled by the American Glazer family. Neither the Florida-based family nor Musk immediately responded to requests for comment.
British newspaper The Daily Mirror reported last year that the Glazers, who have faced widespread fan opposition to their stewardship since acquiring the club in 2005 for 790 million pounds ($957m), were prepared to sell but only if they were offered in excess of 4 billion pounds ($4.85bn).