In the late 19th century a confederate colonel named John Pemberton, who owned a pharmacy south of Atlanta, had recently developed a wine drink he called Pemberton's French Wine Coca nerve tonic.
Pemberton had been wounded in the Civil War and was said to be addicted to morphine. He had a medical degree and aspired to develop an alternative to the troublesome opiate.
When Atlanta and Fulton County passed prohibition laws in 1886, Pemberton developed a non-alcoholic version of the tonic called Coca-Cola (KO).
Its name referred to coca leaves and kola nuts, two of its original ingredients.
Even without the prohibition legislation that was gaining support politically at the time, the movement to abstain from alcohol was growing in popularity socially as well. In response, Pemberton marketed Coca-Cola as "the temperance drink."
During the 20th century, Coca-Cola grew to become not only the most popular soft drink in the U.S., but also quickly spread across the world to dominate the global market.
In 2022, Coca-Cola remains the most popular soft drink in the world. Its low calorie version, Diet Coke, has a large following as well.
Diet Coke consumers include some powerful people from the worlds of business and politics, including former U.S. Presidents Bill Clinton and Donald Trump as well as Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates.
Elon Musk Reveals a Taste For Coke
In a recent tweet, Tesla (TSLA) CEO and new Twitter owner Elon Musk revealed his soft drink of choice. The post attracted media attention for a photo of two guns on his nightstand, but four open cans of caffeine-free Diet Coke appeared next to it as well.
"My bedside table," wrote Musk, describing what was seen in the photo.
Then a Musk tweet from April 27 resurfaced on Nov. 28, as it became public knowledge that framed printouts of tweets hang in the lobby of a San Francisco Twitter building. One of them was a joke Musk made two days after Twitter's board first accepted Musk's buyout offer of $44 billion.
"Next I'm buying Coca-Cola to put the cocaine back in," the tweet said.
Dave Beckett, a Senior Staff Site Reliability Engineer at Twitter, posted a photo of the framed printouts. The photo shows the Musk tweet in the middle of two others.
"WTF," he writes as Twitter user @dajobe.
Twitter Users React to Musk's Coke Joke
Responses to the photo of the printed out tweets appeared soon on the microblogging site.
"Look at all the free advertisements he gets," writes @DannyWi53843838. "All he has to do is make a statement on anything, anyone, and then the people who like reply and the people who don't like him make a post."
"It’s a metaphor. A joke," says @PillerLoren. "I know you programmers are literal but understand that the English language unlike programming languages has a lot more slop so that we can laugh more often. Get a real life or at least disengage from the borg for part of the day."
"Super funny and thanks for sharing," remarks @Catboy02. "I just hope you don't get Das Boot for sharing photos from inside the company -- I know lots of H.R.-type people/rules don't exactly appreciate that sort of activity."
