The $100 Storage Unit Holding James Bond's Submarine

For The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), the Bond production built "Wet Nellie" — a Lotus Esprit converted into a genuinely functional wet submarine, with propellers, ballast tanks and articulated fins, at a cost of roughly $100,000. After a promotional tour, the studio parked it in a Long Island storage unit prepaid for about a decade — and then everyone forgot about it. The rent lapsed.

In 1989, a Long Island building contractor paid under $100 at a blind lien auction for the unit''s unseen contents, hoping for power tools. Under a pile of blankets sat a dented, wheel-less white sports car unlike anything he''d seen. He and his wife had never watched a Bond film. Hauling it home on a flatbed, they learned what they had from truckers buzzing about it over CB radio. The Ian Fleming Foundation authenticated it as the one and only submarine Esprit.

Cosmetically restored and exhibited for years, Wet Nellie sold at a 2013 London auction for $997,000 to an anonymous bidder — soon revealed as Elon Musk, who had watched the scene as a kid in South Africa and was "disappointed to learn it can''t actually transform." He later said the car partly inspired the Cybertruck''s design.

The lo.st takeaway: A studio lost a six-figure asset to an unpaid storage invoice, and its recovery hinged on a stranger''s blind $100 bet. Items in storage are the easiest things in the world to lose — one prepaid decade at a time.