Featured Image Credit: Alamy
Topics: Elon Musk
Anish Vij
Elon Musk was caught up in a terrifying car crash in a McLaren F1 in 2000.
The silver sports car was worth $1 million at the time and a 28-year-old Musk had sold his first start up for a whopping $22 million.
His next venture was X.com, an internet based megabank concept, which was put on hold by a man named Peter Thiel, who was in charge of a company called Confinity.
In hopes of making it work, a merger between the two companies were on the cards and Musk had offered Thiel a lift in his new whip so the pair could discuss business.
Speaking about the incident on the PandoDaily show back in 2012, Elon recalled: “I was driving up Sand Hill Road with Peter Thiel, one of the cofounders of PayPal.
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"I didn't really know how to drive the McLaren and Peter says, ‘So what can this do?’
“And probably number one on the list of famous last words, I said ‘watch this’.
“So I floored it and did a lane change on Sand Hill. The McLaren has no traction control or anything, it was just massive power to the wheels, 640 brake horsepower and it only weighs a tonne."
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He added: “So it has massive hardware, it can brake the wheels free at 80 miles an hour, so broke the rear end free and started spinning and I was going straight and then turned.
“And I remember seeing the cars coming towards me while I was going backwards.
“And then we hit the hit a 45-degree embankment on Sand Hill, which tossed the car into the air like a discus, and it kept rotating with about three foot of air clearance, according to witnesses, and then slammed down on the ground going the original direction."
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Musk revealed that he had blew the suspension out, yet remarkably 'it didn't actually wreck the car', completely.
He continued: “The course chassis and the engine were OK but but all the glass and the wheels and everything was shredded and there was massive body damage to the front and rear.”
The merger of the two companies eventually became 'PayPal', which Musk later sold his stake to fund investments such as SpaceX and Tesla.
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