Elon Musk said on Twitter he was buying English soccer team Manchester United only to say hours later it was a joke, the latest example of the Tesla chief executive’s using the platform to drop confusing statements about his intentions.
Mr. Musk’s initial tweet on Tuesday came as a reply to a post he’d made five minutes earlier about politics, in which he said: “To be clear, I support the left half of the Republican Party and the right half of the Democratic Party!” Mr. Musk then tweeted: “Also, I’m buying Manchester United ur welcome.”
In a follow-up tweet about 4½ hours later, responding to a follower asking if he was serious, Mr. Musk said: “No, this is a long-running joke on Twitter. I’m not buying any sports teams.”
The world’s wealthiest person and one of Twitter’s most prominent users, with more than 100 million followers, Mr. Musk has used the platform before to drop big pronouncements—some serious, many of them not.
Weeks after persuading Twitter to accept his $44 billion acquisition offer in April, he used the platform to say that the deal was “temporarily on hold” pending clarity on questions about the company’s user data. He later cited the same issue, in part, as reason for trying to walk away from the deal, prompting Twitter to sue the billionaire to enforce the contract. A trial in that case is scheduled for October in Delaware’s Court of Chancery.
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