In 1999 Elon Musk stood outside a small apartment at seven in the morning and watched a million-dollar car come off a truck. He was 27. “There are only 62 cars like this in the world, and I’m going to own one of them.” Months earlier he had sold Zip2 to Compaq for $307 million. His own share was about $22 million. A camera crew came to film the delivery. The video below is that morning. “Just three years ago I was showering at the Y and sleeping on the office floor.” Then he was asked what he was afraid of. It was not losing the money. “My biggest fear is that we become spoiled kids. That we lose the sense of gratitude and appreciation.” His fiancée was standing next to him. He said he knew exactly what the money could do. “I could go and buy one of the islands in the Bahamas and turn it into my personal fiefdom. But I’m much more interested in trying to build and create a new company.” He put $12 million of the $22 million into an online bank called X.com. Almost nobody believed in it. “It’s sort of like a series of poker games. I didn’t take my winnings off the table. I put almost all of it back into the next game.” X.com became PayPal. eBay bought it in 2002. His share came out around $180 million. That went into SpaceX and Tesla. The car lasted about a year. He was driving Peter Thiel to a meeting with Sequoia Capital. He floored it. The McLaren went into the air and came down wrecked. He had never insured it. Both of them walked away. They still went to the meeting. The island he did not buy is still an island. A McLaren F1 now sells for more than $15 million. He cashed out one time in his life and spent it on that car. Everything else he put back on the table. Would you have put it back?

Here’s video of the accident. Looks like the Nissan rear-ended the Zoox; pretty negligent driving on the end of the Nissan, but not sure why the Zoox was traveling so slowly.