He crashed a million-dollar car he never insured, then told the friend sitting next to him he thought it would never happen to him. “Watch this.” That’s what Elon Musk said right before he lost control of his own McLaren F1. His name is Elon Musk. The year was 2000. He’d just pocketed $22 million selling his first company, Zip2, and used $1 million of it on one of only 106 McLaren F1s ever built. He was driving Peter Thiel to pitch Sequoia Capital for what would become PayPal when Thiel asked what the car could do. Musk floored it. The F1 had 640 horsepower, weighed barely a ton, and had zero traction control. The back end snapped out instantly, spun the car backward into an embankment, and launched it into the air spinning like a discus. Both men walked away unhurt. The car didn’t. According to Thiel, Musk’s first words afterward were that he’d read plenty of stories about guys who made money, bought a supercar, and crashed it, and figured it would never happen to him, which is also why he never bought insurance. They hitchhiked separately to the meeting instead of showing up together. Honestly, the detail that stays with me isn’t the crash, it’s that he still made the pitch meeting that same day, uninsured wreck and all, like the car was just a line item he’d deal with later. Would you have skipped insurance on a million-dollar car too, or is that exactly the kind of bet that only looks smart once you’re already a billionaire?