Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, had a hearty laugh discussing his famous “cocaine in Coca-Cola” tweet at a podcast.
Attending the “All-in Podcast” virtually, Musk, 50, was talking about the number of bots on Twitter when he used his tweet as an example.
For the unversed, last month Musk had tweeted: “Next I’m buying Coca-Cola to put the cocaine back in,” sending Twitter into a frenzy. The tweet has 4.8 million likes so far.
“I have the honour of having the most liked tweet of any living human. Thank you everyone for liking my tweet, including some of the bots out there. That tweet has under 5 million likes… around 4.7 million likes or something like,” Musk said in between laughs.
While Musk’s tweet is the most liked from any living human, it is not the most liked tweet ever. The honour of the most liked tweet ever is with late actor Chadwick Boseman, whose death announcement on Twitter has a whopping 7.1 million “likes”. The "Black Panther" actor died in August 2020 and his family had posted a statement from his Twitter account announcing his demise.
The tweet also had 2.9 million retweets, the fourth most retweeted ever.
Musk went on to joke about the Coca-Cola tweet with the panel.
“That (cocaine in Coca-Cola) is clearly something that the public really wants. Coca-Cola should really think about going back to their roots. This is why our grandparents could walk 20 miles in the snow… Because they had Coca-Cola with cocaine.”
Read more: Elon Musk tweet about buying Coca-Cola to put 'cocaine back in' has 4.8 million likes
Interestingly, soft drink giant Coca-Cola did actually have cocaine as key ingredient when it was launched. The cocaine was derived from the coca leaf and another main ingredient caffeine was sourced from cola nut, leading to the brand name Coca-Cola. This was back in the 1890s when cocaine was used as a medicinal drug in the US.
At one point, Coca-Cola contained a whopping 9mg cocaine per glass which was significantly reduced over the years before being completely scrapped as Prohibition hit the US, stigmatising the psychotropic drug.
Also read: Watch: Twitter claims bots are less than 5%, says Elon Musk. Cue the laughter
Then, Elon Musk explained why his Coca-Cola tweet was relevant to the number of bots.
“That is literally the most popular tweet of any living human. Twitter says the monetized daily active users is 217 million so why would it be that the most popular tweet be two or two and half percent of the entire user base? Seems like a very, very low number. Most popular tweets are generally clustered around 4-million likes level, that is two percent or less than 2 percent of daily active users. And technically monetisable daily active users. Clearly, 10 percent users should like this (tweet).”
Musk also laughed talking about a Twitter claim that says over 95 per cent users on the platform are humans.
Musk rubbished the claim and said the lowest estimate of bots is not 5 percent but around 20 percent.
“Lots of quite smart, outside firms have also done an analysis of Twitter and looked at the daily users and their conclusion is also about 20 percent bots. That’s a lower bound not upper bound. Something doesn’t add up and it’s not like its five or seven or eight percent bots, but is it potentially 80 percent or 90 percent bots.”
Musk added that he knows there are humans on Twitter, of course, but whether the number of bots is potentially half the user base of the social media giant is a big question.
The latest remarks from Musk have been casting doubt on the $44 billion Twitter deal. The world’s richest man declared some days back that the deal was "temporarily on hold" but that he's "still committed to acquisition”. He just needs more clarity on the bots problem.
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