Elon Musk is a car enthusiast, which perhaps explains why he started an entire business dedicated to better and more beautiful electric vehicles than existing ones around the world. But not only did he have to create good cars and send Tesla's Roadsters into space, he also liked to buy good cars, and the rarer, uniqueer, and different they were, the more he liked them (as they seemed).
The CEOs of Tesla and SpaceX used his fortune to buy some very expensive things, such as Rockets or other companies (he bought Twitter for more than $40 billion, of which about $20 billion came from the shares he sold Tesla and $20 billion from loans arranged by Morgan Stanley), but the most notable of them was his incredible car collection.
Musk reportedly loves bone cars, and he owns the 1978 BMW 320i, the 1997 McLaren F1, the 1920s Ford Model T and the breathtaking 1967 Jaguar E-Type, but the diamonds in his collection are undoubtedly a gem that many people remember as having appeared in the 007 movie sports car. You'd guess it was Aston Martin, sorry, but it wasn't.
Which antique car does Musk own that appears in the 007 movie?
In Musk's garage, you can find a 1976 Lotus Esprit "Wet Nellie," which isn't the most beautiful car in the world, but has a lot to do with pop culture and has an interesting history. The world's richest man is an open Pound fan, and everything related to the most famous film spy knows everything, and certainly won't miss the car that Pound drove in the movie.
Musk, who grew up with his parents divorced and bullied by his classmates and fell down the stairs, once said that he grew up watching movies (his father was busy with a mineral and spent only a few hours at home with him), and when he saw 1977's "007: Underwater City" as a child, he noticed that lotus Esprit 007 in 1976, nicknamed Wet Nellie, was one of the craziest weapons developed by Mr. Q, and got some comfort in Musk Jr.'s lonely mind.
The prototype of this car is actually the Most popular Esprit S1 sports car in the history of Lotus, England, which appeared in the car chase scene in the movie and was transformed into a small submarine for the sake of the scene. There was no CGI at the time, and the special effects team had to be very creative to put their ideas into practice, so the film producers had to build the wheelless Esprit and make some modifications in order to use it for real underwater shooting (at the time, it cost about $100,000).
The tricky part of the submarine was that it didn't release water when it was immersed in water, so the people inside had to dive out of the car, and a U.S. Navy SEAL member was dispatched to assist at the time. In the plot of the movie, the car is a secret weapons project led by Mr. Q of the MI6 department, but the intelligence is stolen by female agents of the Soviet GUBEU. In order to shoot this special effects scene, a total of six cars were dispatched, but not every one of them was a real car that could be moved, and it is worth mentioning that the Esprit that Pound drove on the road used the private car of the chairman of Lotus at the time.
The name "Wet Nellie" is a continuation of Little Nellie, a spinning rotorcraft that appeared in the 1967 Pound film Thunder Valley, and Nellie actually refers to the female comedian Nellie Wallace who rose to prominence in silent films in the 20s. In any case, Musk has always been obsessed with the car, so in 2013, knowing that the car was at auction and selling for it, he did not consider buying it for $1 million.
As for the lotus Esprit series of new models later appeared "007 Top Secret" and a series of Hollywood productions to become the protagonist of the show off the rich, but the most famous is the "Sparrow to Phoenix" film Richard Kier in the Hollywood street when Richard Kirr drove Julia Roberts when the sports car Lotus 5 Esprit SE, at that time, in fact, the producer's first choice was Ferrari and Porsche, but the car factory resolutely refused as soon as it heard that the heroine on the car was a blocker girl in the movie. Instead, Lotus volunteered as soon as he heard it, contributing to the film history story.