How Elon Musk's car collection has evolved over the years, from the million-dollar McLaren F1 he destroyed to a James Bond movie prop Lotus

Musk said in a Forbes video that he bought it in 1994 and fixed it up himself. He had it for two years when one of the wheels fell off, an unfortunate incident that happened when one of his interns from his first company, Zip2, was driving it.

Musk explained in the Forbes video that when he was 17 he was given a book of classic convertibles. The convertible he liked best from the book was the Jaguar E-Type, so he told himself if he ever could afford it he would buy one.

When he got an initial bonus check of $40,000 for Zip2, Musk bought the car.

"That one was like a bad girlfriend — it kept breaking down on me and causing me all sorts of trouble," Musk said of the car in the video.

"I had it for several years and I put 11,000 miles on it and I drove it from LA to San Francisco. I had it as a daily driver," Musk said of his McLaren F1 in an interview with Pando Daily seven years ago.

New, the car sold for nearly a million dollars.

Musk was driving with Thiel on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park to see Michael Moritz, a venture capitalist with Sequoia Capital.

In this video, you can see Musk getting his McLaren delivered.

Shortly thereafter, Musk hit an embankment, launching his car in the air where it kept rotating "like a discus." When it hit the ground again, the glass and wheels were shredded and the car had suffered massive body damage, as you can see above.

The car wasn't insured.

"It was amazing as a little kid in South Africa to watch James Bond in 'The Spy Who Loved Me' drive his Lotus Esprit off a pier, press a button and have it transform into a submarine underwater," Musk said in a statement to Huffington Post.

"I was disappointed to learn that it can't actually transform. What I'm going to do is upgrade it with a Tesla electric powertrain and try to make it transform for real," he continued.

Musk said he wanted to make a car where the door could open in tight spaces and allow you to access the third row without putting the second-row seats down.

Accessing that third row easily is a problem Musk said he has had with his Audi Q7, which Forbes saw he owned during a 2012 walkthrough Musk's home.

"The Audi Q7 is particularly horrendous. Even in the best-case scenario, you need to be a dwarf mountain climber to get into the back seat," he said.

Source: Vanity Fair, TopSpeed

Source: Forbes

Source: Twitter

In 2018, SpaceX launched its Falcon Heavy rocket. Inside, Musk parked his own Roadster with an astronaut dummy named "Starman" at the wheel.

The rocket is orbiting the sun, passing by Venus and Mercury as well — researchers have predicted that the Roadster inside will orbit the sun for the next few million years. Musk said last year that SpaceX could launch another rocket to catch up with the car "in a few years."

Source: Twitter

Source: Twitter

Source: Twitter

Source: Business Insider