Man once sold £78 shipping container to Elon Musk for more than £600k

A man once managed to sell Elon Musk a container he got for £78 for £600,000. Talk about a markup.

Back in 1989, an American man and his brother bought a mystery box without knowing its contents.

When they opened it, they found a white sports car which was used in the 1977 James Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me.

The film featured an iconic Lotus Esprit that could transform into a submarine and travel underwater. Nicknamed on-set as ‘Wet Nellie’, it was reportedly thought to have cost more than $100,000 (£78,400) to build in the 1970s.

According to NBC News, Doug Redenius, the co-founder of the Ian Fleming Foundation said of the discovery: “They really didn’t know what it was at first. They had no idea how valuable their discovery was." It took more than 24 years after finding the car for the brothers to put it up for auction.

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In 2013, the Guardian reported that Elon Musk entered the London auction anonymously and outbid the competition, purchasing the submarine car for $997,000 (£616,000). He then revealed it was him.

In a statement, he said: “It was amazing as a little kid in South Africa to watch James Bond in The Spy Who Loved Me drive his Lotus Espirit off a pier, press a button and have it transform into a submarine underwater. I was disappointed to learn that it can’t actually transform. What I’m going to do is upgrade it with a Tesla electric powertrain and try to make it transform for real.”

How random.

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