Every Iconic Car Owned by Elon Musk: From Ford Model T to McLaren F1
As Tesla’s CEO, Elon Musk is practically synonymous with electric vehicles, although his personal history began with gas-powered cars. In 1994, at age 23, Musk paid $1,400 for a used BMW 320i, which he repaired himself and drove for two years. Over the decades that followed, he also owned a 1967 Jaguar E-Type, a Porsche 911 Turbo and a McLaren F1 that cost close to $1 million. Then there was “Wet Nellie.” In 2013, Musk paid nearly $1 million for the Lotus Esprit submarine prop seen in the 1977 James Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me. The car later inspired Tesla’s Cybertruck.
While Musk has never published a complete inventory, interviews and social media posts provide a partial record of the classic and collectible vehicles the Tesla CEO has bought, kept and sold over the years.
Ford Model T (likely 1920s)
Of the two gas cars Musk most recently said he owned, the Ford Model T is perhaps the most unexpected. Musk first disclosed the vehicle in October 2017, writing on Twitter (now X) that he received it from a friend. Several automotive roundups describe it as a 1920 model, but none provides documentation. As of 2024, the antique Ford was still in his collection.
Between 1908 and 1927, Ford built more than 15 million Model Ts. By the early 1920s, more than half of the registered automobiles worldwide were Fords. The automaker’s moving assembly line helped lower the Model T’s price from $850 to $260 — or roughly $5,000 today — putting car ownership within reach of the broader public.
A century later, Tesla adopted a similar strategy. In his 2006 “master plan,” Musk said the company would begin with an expensive sports car and use the proceeds to develop more affordable models. The plan eventually took Tesla from its first production vehicle, the Roadster, to mass-market models like the Model 3 and Y.
In 2025, Musk credited Ford for establishing the foundation for large-scale manufacturing. Responding to an X post in which Ford CEO Jim Farley compared the automaker’s new EV production with its Model T-era assembly line, Musk wrote, “Ford basically invented mass manufacturing of large, complex products. Everyone else copied. Most people don’t know this.”
Jaguar E-Type Series 1 Roadster (1967)
Unveiled at the Geneva Motor Show in 1961, the British sports car paired a sleek, aerodynamic body with a top speed of 150 mph, yet cost only a fraction of its rivals.
Musk’s love for the vehicle began at age 17, when he obtained a book about classic convertibles. “I looked through all, and the one I liked the best was the E-type Jaguar,” he recalled in a 2012 Forbes interview. “I said, ‘Well, if I can ever afford it, that is the car that I want to get.’”
That opportunity came during the early days of Zip2, Musk’s first major startup. He spent a small bonus from an investor on the Jaguar. But the excitement was short-lived. “It was like a bad girlfriend — it kept breaking down on me, causing me all sorts of trouble,” he said. “In fact, it broke down on the way back from the dealer,” Musk told Forbes.
Yet, he held onto it. In a 2017 post on Twitter, Musk called the vehicle “my first love.” By 2024, it remained one of the only two gasoline cars he owned, alongside the Model T.
Lotus Esprit S1 “Wet Nellie” (1977)
Unlike the other vehicles in Musk’s collection, this one cannot be driven on the road. In 2013, Musk bought the modified Lotus Esprit at an auction through an anonymous bid for £616,000, or about $920,000 at the time.
Decades earlier, the vehicle had been converted into a working submarine for the 1977 James Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me, in which Roger Moore’s 007 drives the car off a pier before it appears to transform underwater.
At the time, the transformation captivated audiences, including a young Musk. “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 wrote in a 2013 statement reported by The Guardian. “I was disappointed to learn that it can’t actually transform.”
Built as a “wet” submarine—meaning its cabin filled with
After the film, “Wet Nellie” wound up in a storage unit in Holbrook, N.Y. When the lease expired, a Long Island couple bought its contents in a 1989 blind auction for a reported $100 and discovered the damaged but largely intact submarine beneath blankets. It was later authenticated and restored before Musk acquired it at auction in 2013.
Musk later wrote on X that he planned to add a Tesla powertrain and make the vehicle transform “for real.” Years later, when Tesla unveiled the Cybertruck in 2019, he said its design was partly influenced by The Spy Who Loved Me.
BMW 320i (1978)
Before the Bond submarine and even Tesla, Musk’s automotive history began more modestly with a used 1978 BMW. Musk bought the car in 1994 for $1,400, when he was 23.
The 320i belonged to the E21 generation, the first version of BMW’s 3 Series. Introduced in Europe in 1975 and brought to North America for the 1977 model year, the compact sedan had rear-wheel drive and BMW’s familiar kidney-shaped grille.
Musk said he kept his BMW for about two years, including during the early days of Zip2. Its time with him ended—or at least took a turn—after Musk lent the car to a company intern, who called him to report that one of the wheels “fell off the car,” he told Forbes.
Musk has not said publicly if the BMW was repaired, sold or scrapped, but his later posts on Twitter/X suggest that the 320i has long since left his collection.
McLaren F1, Chassis 067 (1997)
If the Jaguar E-Type was Musk’s first love, the McLaren F1 was his first extravagance. After Compaq Computer acquired Zip2 for $307 million in 1999, Musk received roughly $22 million and spent around $1 million on the magnesium-silver 1997 F1, one of seven F1 cars imported to the U.S. through the Ameritech program. In a 2018 Twitter post, Musk recalled choosing between a supercar and a house in Palo Alto. “Was no contest,” he wrote. “I bought F1 & a small condo that was much cheaper than the car.”
Designed under Gordon Murray, the F1 was the first production road car built around a carbon-fiber monocoque. Its 627-horsepower BMW V-12 sat behind a three-seat cabin, with the driver positioned in the center and two passengers slightly behind. McLaren produced 106 examples across all versions, including 64 road cars. Musk said he used his regularly.
In 2000, Musk was driving the F1 on Silicon Valley’s Sand Hill Road with PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel. The duo was headed to a meeting with Sequoia Capital’s Michael Moritz when Thiel asked, “So what can this do?”
“Watch this,” Musk recalled replying in a 2012 interview with PandoDaily. “I floored it and did a lane change on Sand Hill. The McLaren has no traction control or anything. It only weighs a ton, so it has massive power.”
The car spun into a roughly 45-degree embankment, launching it into the air “like a discus,” Musk said. Neither man was injured, though the uninsured F1 sustained extensive damage. Musk and Thiel hitchhiked to their meeting; Musk later had the car restored and said he eventually sold it at a profit.
The sale was among several efforts to raise cash as Tesla and SpaceX faced financial pressure starting in 2008. “The McLaren is a great car,” he later told Wheels Magazine in 2013. “It’s a work of art, a really beautiful piece of engineering, but I didn’t want people always writing that I have a high-performance gasoline sports car, so I decided to sell it.”
Since then, McLaren F1 values have risen considerably. In December 2025, a different road-going F1 sold through RM Sotheby’s for a record $25.3 million. Another will come to market during this year’s Monterey Car Week. This weekend, the auction house will offer a separate 1996 F1 GTR with a stated value above $35 million.
Known as the “Pop Art F1,” that race-derived prototype spent more than 25 years with Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason. While not directly comparable with Musk’s F1, the figures show how sharply the market has moved since Musk’s own 1999 purchase.
Porsche 911 Turbo (model year unknown)
After eBay acquired PayPal for $1.5 billion in 2002, Musk began exploring the potential of electric sports cars. Around that time, engineer JB Straubel, who later served as Tesla’s longtime CTO and is now recognized as a co-founder, told Musk about the tzero, a battery-powered vehicle developed by California-based AC Propulsion. Musk then arranged a test drive, according to a 2008 Fortune account.
Musk tried to buy the tzero, but AC Propulsion declined to sell it. The company also rejected his $250,000 offer to convert his Porsche 911 Turbo to electric. Porsche eventually introduced an EV of its own, the Taycan, in 2019; the model remains in production.
The conversation nevertheless led Musk toward Tesla. Tom Gage, then CEO of AC Propulsion, introduced him to Martin Eberhard, who had established Tesla with engineer Marc Tarpenning in 2003. After a two-hour meeting in February 2004, Musk agreed to invest $6.3 million and become Tesla’s chairman.
A 2012 ForbesLife profile indicated that Musk still owned a Porsche 911 at the time. By October 2017, however, Musk said the E-Type and Ford Model T were the only gasoline cars he still owned.
