When Elon Musk sold his first company, Zip2, in 1999 for $22 million, his first major purchase was a $1 million F1 McLaren. The CNN cameras were there to capture it. A 28 year old software developer, three years removed from showering at the YMCA and sleeping on his office floor, now owned one of only 106 McLaren F1s ever built.
After taking delivery of chassis #067, Musk drove the hell out of the McLaren, using it as his daily driver around San Francisco and the Bay Area at large, driving it back and forth to Los Angeles, and putting 11,000 miles on the car in his first year of ownership. This wasn't garage jewelry. This was his commuter car for the 400 mile slog between cities.
The Crash: Peter Thiel Was There
In 2000, while driving on Sand Hill Road with PayPal Co-Founder Peter Thiel to a meeting, a moment of bravado led Musk to demonstrate the car's capabilities. "Watch this," he said, moments before the McLaren spun out of control, flew "like a discus" 3 feet into the air and crashed. The worst part? The car wasn't insured.
Peter Thiel later recounted the moment to PandoDaily: "I wasn't wearing a seatbelt, which is not advisable. Elon's first comment was, 'Wow, Peter, that was really intense.' And then it was: 'You know, I had read all these stories about people who made money and bought sports cars and crashed them. But I knew it would never happen to me, so I didn't get any insurance.' And then we hitchhiked the rest of the way to the meeting".
Musk reportedly had it repaired and hung on to it until 2007 when he sold it at a profit. While Musk was incredibly fond of his McLaren, as he started Tesla and began innovating the electric vehicle segment, he felt that he needed to let go of his collection of combustion engined cars in order to maintain brand image.
The Value Explosion
In 1999, $1,000,000 was substantial money. Adjusted for inflation, that's approximately $1,945,000 in today's purchasing power. McLaren F1 values have done something remarkable since. A 1994 McLaren F1, first delivered to the Brunei Royal Family, sold at RM Sotheby's Abu Dhabi 2025 auction for $25,317,500. That's the highest price ever paid for a McLaren F1 road car at public auction.
Other recent sales confirm the trend. A unique 'time capsule' McLaren F1 road car set a record auction price of $20.465 million at Gooding & Company's Pebble Beach Auctions in 2022, with less than 390 kilometres on its odometer. Values vary based on mileage, provenance, and condition, but the range for road spec McLaren F1s now sits firmly between $20 million and $26 million.
Using $25 million as current value and $1,945,000 as inflation adjusted purchase price, the math is staggering. That's a gross profit of $24,055,000 or roughly 1,236 percent inflation adjusted return over 26 years. If the car reaches $30 million, which isn't unreasonable for particularly significant examples, the return climbs to 1,442 percent.
Why It Worked
The McLaren F1, which many consider one of the greatest automobiles ever created, was a production model. Just 106 of the iconic three seater, V12 engined F1 road cars were produced between 1992 and 1998, with just 64 being completed to original road car specification. Extreme rarity meets exceptional engineering meets motorsport pedigree. The F1 won Le Mans on its debut. It remained the world's fastest naturally aspirated production car for decades.
The McLaren F1 is one of the rarest supercars in the world, the very car that invented the supercar genre as we know it today. Gordon Murray's design, with its central driving position and BMW V12, became instantly legendary. Modern regulations make building anything remotely similar impossible. That finality drives values.
The Irony
Elon Musk crashed an uninsured million dollar supercar in 2000, paid out of pocket for repairs, daily drove it like a Honda Civic, and still made over $20 million profit when accounting for inflation. Musk himself confirmed to PandoDaily that the car was uninsured, why anyone with the scratch to buy a McLaren F1 in cash wouldn't also spring for insurance is beyond us. But when appreciation outpaces even catastrophic repair costs, insurance becomes optional.
Musk's F1 features 670 hp. Tesla's Model S Plaid now does 0 to 60 faster than the McLaren managed. But the Plaid depreciates. The F1 appreciates. As you might expect, he considered it an image problem for the CEO of an electric car company to drive the pinnacle of internal combustion engineering. He also desperately needed some cash to help keep Tesla Motors and SpaceX afloat at the time.
The man who sold a McLaren F1 in 2007 to fund Tesla's survival now runs the world's most valuable automaker. The McLaren he sold is worth five times what he got for it. Sometimes the wrong financial decision creates the right outcome anyway. Musk needed cash for Tesla. He got it by selling an appreciating asset at what seemed like peak value. That asset then quintupled. Tesla became worth a trillion dollars. Both decisions worked despite being contradictory.
That's the Elon Musk story in miniature. Crash an uninsured supercar. Repair it out of pocket. Daily drive it for 11,000 miles. Sell it to fund an electric car company everyone said would fail. Watch both the car and the company appreciate beyond anyone's predictions. Make billions. The McLaren F1 investment worked despite the crash. The Tesla investment worked despite the skepticism. And somewhere, chassis #067 sits in someone's collection, worth $25 to $30 million, with 11,000 miles showing Elon Musk's daily commutes and one memorable crash with Peter Thiel that neither of them will ever forget.
