The mysterious 'collector' who spent $866,000 on the James Bond Lotus submarine from The Spy Who Loved Me was none other than billionaire investor and Tesla CEO Elon Musk Jalopnik has exclusively learned. That makes perfect sense.
In what sounds like a staged bit for Storage Wars, a man bought a storage container for $100 and inside find a giant lump covered in blankets. When he removed the covers he found a random white car underneath.
The guy who bought it had never seen a Bond movie and had no idea what that white car was, until someone else pointed it out to him that it looked exactly like the famous Lotus sub from the Bond flick.
The dots were ultimately connected and it was revealed to be the actual car from the movie, lost in storage. The vehicle went to RM Auctions, who led the restoration and put it up for auction, where it sold for $866,000 to a 'secret buyer' in a showdown between two collectors.
Now we've heard from a credible source in the UK, where it was sold, that the buyer was none other than Elon Musk, CEO of carmaker Tesla and SpaceX, who is also a noted car enthusiast with excellent taste.
Considering the first Tesla ever was based on a Lotus Elise, there's no shock he's also a fan of the submersible Esprit. There's also that crackpot theory that Elon Musk is actually a Bond villain building a space laser, which this certainly won't help.