The Luxury Car Elon Musk Totaled In Seconds
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has been a polarizing figure in recent months. He stepped aside as CEO of Twitter in the spring, but last week issued a vulgar statement to companies that pulled ads from the platform after he responded to an antisemitic post with the comment, "You have said the actual truth." Musk purchased Twitter last year and rebranded it as X in April, but the company has lost about two-thirds of its value in his brief stewardship.
Tesla's per-share stock price has also fluctuated wildly, from a peak of more than $400 about 13 months ago to about $113 this past January. Tesla finally began delivery of its long-hyped Cybertruck last week in a dubiously arranged promotional event that did little to dispel doubts about the quirky EV after numerous production delays. Now that the stainless steel three-ton behemoth is ready to hit public roads, speculation about its performance and reliability will give way to anecdotal reports, slowly building into a consensus as Cybertrucks reach the production phase.
Musk's personal history with vehicles has one huge blemish as well. In 1999, Musk sold his first startup, Zip2, to Compaq for over $300 million. Musk's cut from that sale was $22 million, and he spent $1 million of that on a 1997 McLaren F1, one of only 106 of the legendary supercars ever made. Musk destroyed the rare machine the following year in a moment of hubris.
Musk wrecked his F1 and his relationship with Peter Thiel
Musk and Peter Thiel (one of the founders of PayPal) were on their way to meet with venture capitalist Mike Moritz to seek investment in PayPal when Musk crashed the F1 on a Palo Alto road.
As he told Pando Daily, "We're driving up Sand Hill Road, and I didn't really know how to drive the McLaren." Thiel asked Musk what the car was capable of, to which Musk cheekily responded, "Watch this." Musk said he then floored it and immediately lost control of the 640-horsepower beast, crashing it into an embankment. All of the glass in the car was shattered, and it suffered extensive body damage, but fortunately, neither man was injured.
Musk didn't have insurance on the car, however, and ultimately had to repair it out of pocket. He kept the F1 until 2007, and this past summer, the car was displayed at the Goodwood Festival of Speed in West Sussex, England. However, the crash did irreparable damage to Musk and Thiel's business relationship. In his book "The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power," author Max Chafkin wrote, "The experience shook Thiel, who came to see Musk as reckless" (via Business Insider).