Elon Musk is a real character. He took Tesla from a dodgy business doomed to failure to one of the fastest selling auto companies in the US, and not just in the EV market. Sales are strong and profits are rolling in. Stocks go up and down and Elon Musk’s fortune fluctuates up and down with him.
Of course, things didn’t go this smoothly for Tesla all along, considering Musk almost sold it once. According to Ashlee Vance’s book Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, 2013 looked bleak for Tesla. So Musk reached out to Google Co-Founder and CEO Larry Page for a quick $ 11 billion acquisition. In the nth hour, Model S sales began to spike and the deal was put on hold.
This is the man who dropped out of college two days after opting for a PhD. because he had to start a company. On the other hand, nothing is a big surprise to a man who named his son “X Æ A-12”, right?
So when you hear about Elon Musk crashing a McLaren F1, you will likely shrug your shoulders and expect it from him. But the real bang is in the details. Here’s the DL on Elon Musk, his eccentricities, and how he put a McLaren F1 together.
Before Tesla, there was PayPal
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Musk has always been an entrepreneur. At 12, he made a video game, Blastar, and sold it for $ 500. Of course this was small fries. He broke a Stanford Ph.D. and launched Zip2, which was later sold to Compaq and raised Musk’s first million. $ 22 million to be precise.
With a stroke of luck, he started an online banking company, X.com. X.com later merged with Peter Theils Confinity to form PayPal. At that time, Musk became CEO, but when he tried to switch PayPal’s servers from Unix to MS Windows, he was fired. It may have been hard back then, but Musk joked about it because he was fired while on a much-needed vacation. When eBay bought PayPal, Musk made $ 165 million as the largest shareholder and later founded SpaceX before joining Tesla.
But it was from his first stroke of luck, the $ 22 million he made with Zip2, that Elon Musk decided to buy a McLaren F1. And so he immediately spent a million dollars on it.
Buy the McLaren F1 and crash
The 627 hp, 240 MPH McLaren F1 is not for the faint of heart. Even so, Musk managed to keep it fairly undamaged in his first year of ownership and use it as a daily driver. He drove it through San Francisco and back and forth to Los Angeles, covering 11,000 miles in the first year.
It was around this time that PayPal (not yet called that) was looking for investors, and Musk was working with Robert Thiel. On a rather fateful day in 2000, Musk was behind the wheel of the McLaren F1 and drove to a meeting with Thiel. The two were driving up Palo Alto’s Sand Hill Road when Thiel allegedly turned to Musk and asked him what the car could do.
As Musk said in an interview, his answer may have been high on the list of famous last words. Musk said, “Take a look at this.” And then he hit the gas pedal and changed lanes. With more than 600 horses on the barrel, no traction control, and a car that weighed only a ton, this was an accident waiting to happen.
The McLaren F1 spun, hit an embankment, flew a few meters into the air, and spun a little before hitting the ground again. The suspension failed, the glass broke and the front was damaged. But the chassis and engine remained fine.
The punch line to the damaged McLaren F1
Via: Twitter
Musk can’t remember laughing when he got out of the damaged car, but that’s the story. When asked by a shocked Thiel why he was laughing at the car accident, Musk replied: “No, you don’t know the funny part, it wasn’t insured!”.
So yeah, a million dollar car, crashed, minus insurance. What’s even funnier is that Thiel has now hitchhiked to Sequoia Capital to get the funds. Musk waited for the fire trucks and the ambulance to arrive, had the car towed, and also hitchhiked to the meeting. The rest, as they say, is history for PayPal and Musk.
Meanwhile, Musk stuck to the McLaren F1, had it repaired, and eventually sold it for a profit in 2007. At the time, Musk was with Tesla, and driving a gas-guzzling racer just isn’t enough for an electric car CEO. Plus, Tesla needed funds at the time, so a bit of McLaren F1 may have given it the millions of scrap millions it needs to become the multi-billion dollar company it is today.
Trust Musk to turn a crashed car into a cash cow.
Sources: TheGuardian, CNet, BusinessInsider, YouTube
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About the author
Arun Singh Pundir
(993 published articles)
Arun Singh Pundir is a longtime media cracker and has spent most of his life in sales and marketing. In 2018 he officially turned around and switched sides to the editorial. He lives with his wife, two villain sons, and is a car and motorcycle freak in his spare time. Not that he has too much free time. He is currently writing news, features, and listicles for HotCars on anything that has any number or type of wheels. He also writes pop culture, lifestyle, and anything that is rich for TheRichest. At the moment he considers his Isuzu D-Max V-Cross, Suzuki Ciaz and Royal Enfield Classic 500 to be the three current flames of his life. His dream is to drive around the world; even if it takes more than eighty days.
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