Long before Elon Musk became the world’s richest person (briefly), he was a nerdy ‘kid’ showing off his newfound riches with a brand new McLaren F1.

Okay, he was 28 at the time, but look at him in the video below.

In the years leading up to that day, he had co-founded Zip2, a web software company, before selling it to Compaq for $307 million in 1999.

In the same year, he founded X.com, an online bank, which launched PayPal, and it was onwards and upwards from there.

The car was a treat bought with his first dose of Silicon Valley money.

He was really into his fuel-powered cars before he founded Tesla and, as Carscoops points out, if a McLaren F1 is your first choice of supercar, you’ve got pretty good taste.

He’s so happy:

Pretty wild, man.

Despite his claims that it was a million-dollar car, the sticker price when new was actually $815 000. It was, at the time, the fastest car in the world. He also boasts that there were only 62 made.

There were actually 106, but only 64 were street legal.

He went on to wreck it after fellow founder of PayPal Peter Theil, who was driving with him to a meeting, asked: “So what can this thing do?”.

Elon said “watch this”, floored the accelerator, and did a lane change, sending the car backwards into traffic, before it hit an embankment, sending it spinning into the air.

I’ll let him tell you about it:

It hurts my feelings.

[source:carscoops]