Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, tweeted on Tuesday that he was buying football club Manchester United Plc, without providing any details.
Musk has a habit of being unconventional and tweeting irreverently, and it was not immediately clear whether he planned to strike a deal to secure Manchester United.
“I buy Manchester United as welcome,” Musk said in a tweet. The team is controlled by the American Glazer family. Neither the family nor Musk immediately responded to a request for comment.
British newspaper The Daily Mirror reported last year that the Glazers were ready to sell the club, but only if they received more than 4 billion pounds ($4.84 billion).
Musk is currently trying to get out of a $44 billion deal to buy the social media company, which has sued him.
Manchester United is one of the most supported football clubs in the world. They have been champions of England a record 20 times and won the European Cup, the most prestigious club competition in world football, on three occasions.
Fan dissatisfaction with the Glazers’ perceived lack of ambition to bring in top players has intensified after the club finished sixth in the English Premier League last season, while Crosstown rivals Manchester City won a second consecutive title.
The football club had a market capitalization of US$2.08 billion, as of the close of trading on Tuesday.
Manchester United fans have protested in recent years against the Glazers, who bought the club for 790 million pounds ($955.51 million) in 2005, due to the team’s struggles on the pitch.
The anti-Glazer movement gained momentum last year after United were embroiled in a failed bid to form a breakaway European Super League.
Some fans have urged Musk to buy Manchester United instead of buying Twitter.
Musk has a history of unconventional actions and comments, which sometimes makes it hard to tell when he’s joking.
His ambitions range from colonizing Mars to creating a new sustainable energy economy, and in the process he’s built the world’s most valuable auto company, electric vehicle maker Tesla, rocket company SpaceX and a multitude of small businesses. One is a tunnel maker called the Boring Company.
Musk appeared to smoke marijuana in a podcast and fought US regulators over comments about his plans for Tesla, including an abandoned effort to make it private
Forbes estimates his fortune at 270 billion US dollars.
(Reporting by Juby Babu in Bengaluru; Writing by Peter Henderson; Editing by Aditya Soni, Neil Fullick and Michael Perry)