12 memes that shook the internet after Elon Musk announced his plans to buy Manchester United

By Malavika Pradeep

Published Aug 17, 2022 at 10:15 AM

Reading time: 2 minutes

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Images courtesy of David Fisher from Shutterstock and @manchesterunited from Instagram

On 17 August 2022, the world’s richest man and serial tweeter Elon Musk took to the platform he has a love-hate relationship with to drop yet another bombshell: claiming that he’s purchasing the biggest football club in England.

“I’m buying Manchester United ur welcome,” the Tesla CEO nonchalantly tweeted without providing any details. With over 500,000 likes and counting, his claim immediately sparked a debate about the struggling Premier League club’s future. Although Manchester United is one of the most famous names in world football, it’s currently in crisis amid angry calls from fans for the club’s current owners, the American Glazer family, to pull out.

“Please Elon Musk, you’re doing almost a billion fans worldwide a favour,” a user replied to the business magnate’s viral claims. “Well, if anyone knows about car wrecks, it’s certainly Elon Musk!” a second wrote, while others tagged the football club’s official Twitter account—urging them to “consider the kind offer.”

Well, if there’s one thing we’ve all learned from Musk’s tweeting habits, it’s the fact that he often posts cheeky-but-borderline-believable acquisition claims hinged off his social standing as a billionaire—making it difficult to tell if he’s joking or not in the first place.

On 28 April, three days after the Twitter board accepted his unsolicited offer to buy the company, Musk took to the platform and tweeted: “Next I’m buying Coca-Cola to put the cocaine back in.” Four years ago, the space billionaire’s wordy obsession also landed him in hot water with US regulators when he tweeted that there was “funding secured” for a $72 billion deal to take Tesla private, but did not move ahead with an offer.

Ultimately, Musk and Tesla paid $20 million civil fines each as the former stepped down as Tesla’s chairman to resolve US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) claims that he “defrauded investors.”

In Manchester United’s case, Musk did the inevitable and pulled a 360 on his claims after five hours by stating: “No, this is a long-running joke on Twitter. I’m not buying any sports teams.” In his defence, he also added: “Although, if it were any team, it would be Man U. They were my fav team as a kid.”

While some users were enraged by the discourse and asked Musk to “formally apologise” to Manchester United fans for “getting their hopes up,” others dug up old meme templates to express their opinions. Here are 12 of the best internet reactions to the piece of news to date: