A Scottish soccer squad accused Elon Musk of stealing its logo for SpaceX — and the tech billionaire took the club’s suggestion that he buy the team to settle the beef.
The saga began when SpaceX shared a photo on Wednesday of employees at the company’s Starbase spaceport in Boca Chica, Texas.
At the bottom of the rocket launchpad there’s an emblem of a white goat in front of a crescent moon with an “X” across its shoulder.
Social media users began noticing that the logo is strikingly similar to that of Haddington Town AFC. The amateur football club, based 15 miles outside of Edinburgh, uses the goat in all of its branding as a nod to the acronym “greatest of all time.”
“Why has @ElonMusk stole our badge? Give it back!” Haddington Town tweeted alongside laughing emojis and a photo of the supposedly “stolen” symbol, where SpaceX replaced the soccer team’s name with the space exploration company’s signature “X.”
Ryan Leishman, a club representative for Haddington Town, told The Times of London that the organization had no desire to take Musk to court for copyright infringement despite a flurry of replies on social media urging the team to sue.
“We don’t want to fight Elon Musk. If he wants to come and invest in us, we’ll back him when he fights Mark Zuckerberg,” Leishman told The Times.
“I believe they have been calling themselves the ‘goat of space travel’ so I have a feeling they just searched ‘goat badge’ and found us. We just can’t believe it. It is such a weird thing to happen to an amateur football team,” Leishman added.
He also joked to The Times on Friday that Musk was welcome to “invest in us, pay for our new tracksuits, our new kits or something like that.”
By later that day, Haddington Town announced that Musk bought the team with an announcement that said “Welcome Elon Musk” and “Position: Owner.”
“We can officially announce after the #SpaceX teaser that @ElonMusk has joined the Goats! You guys were too quick to spot our badge,” the team tweeted.
It’s unclear how much Musk — the richest person in the world with a net worth of $249 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index — bought the team for, though he’s reportedly planning to attend Haddington Town’s next game against Broomhall FC on Sept. 24.
Representatives for Haddington Town and SpaceX did not immediately respond to noti.group’s request for comment.
Musk, who also serves as the CEO of Tesla and owner of X, formerly known as Twitter, is not someone usually associated with the sports world, though the 52-year-old randomly tweeted last year that he planned to buy Manchester United.
“Also, I’m buying Manchester United ur welcome,” Musk tweeted.
Manchester United is one of the best-known brands in the sporting world with a record 20 league titles in England and has also won the European Cup three times.
The team is owned by the Glazer family, who purchased the team for £790 million ($978.1 million USD) back in 2005.
The Glazers still own Manchester United.
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
