Elon Musk Snuck a Weed Joke Into His Twitter Bid

A letter addressed to Twitter board chairman Bret Taylor sees Musk — ever the playful pothead — offering to buy 100 shares of Twitter at $54.20 per share. If you’re rolling your eyes too, you caught the joke. Weed enthusiasts' favorite string of numbers, "420," was tacked onto the end of the share price, just for fun.

This isn't the first time Musk has gone for the low-hanging fruit; days prior, he tweeted a meme of him smoking during a taping of "The Joe Rogan Experience" podcast with the text "Twitter's next board meeting is gonna be lit." Tacking the seemingly arbitrary use of "420" onto serious valuations, however, has gotten Musk into a great deal of trouble in the past. Most notably, in 2018 Musk tweeted that he was considering taking Tesla private at $420 with "funding secured" during a time when the company was strapped for cash in the thick of production for its Model 3 sedan.

The SEC wasn't too thrilled, and shortly thereafter sued the billionaire for making false or misleading statements though Musk's team retorted that the $420 figure was just meant as a harmless weed joke, all in the name of looking cool for his girlfriend at the time, Grimes.

The September 2018 statement notes that Musk said he used the number “because he had recently learned about the number’s significance in marijuana culture and thought his girlfriend “would find it funny, which admittedly is not a great reason to pick a price.”

All jokes and blunts aside — Musk’s total $41 billion Twitter bid is supposedly a part of his plan to bring “free speech around the globe.”

“I invested in Twitter as I believe in its potential to be the platform for free speech around the globe and I believe free speech is a societal imperative for a functioning democracy,” Musk wrote in the letter to Taylor.

“Since making my investment I now realize the company will neither thrive nor serve this societal imperative in its current form. Twitter needs to be transformed as a private company.”

It looks like Musk is serious about the offer too, writing later in the letter that if his officer isn’t accepted, “I would need to reconsider my position as a shareholder.” Just days before, he was rejected from a seat on Twitter’s company board.

Photo via Getty/ FREDERIC J. BROWN/ AFP