Musk, chief executive of electric car company Tesla Motors and rocket maker SpaceX, bought the car anonymously at auction in London on September 9 for almost $1 million.
In the 1977 film "The Spy Who Loved Me," starring Roger Moore as Agent 007, Bond drives his white Lotus Esprit off a pier and into the sea. As the car sinks underwater, he yanks on the shifter and the car transforms into a submarine.
"I was disappointed to learn that it can't actually transform," Musk said in an email. "What I'm going to do is upgrade it with a Tesla electric powertrain and try to make it transform for real."
His proposal would probably be dismissed as a fantasy if it were made by anyone else. But Musk has amassed a fortune and built an empire through success with several startup companies in a range of industries.
The 42-year-old South African immigrant made his fortune when he co-founded and sold online payment business PayPal to eBay Inc. for $1.5 billion.
Armed with his personal fortune and a Rolodex full of Silicon Valley venture capitalists, Musk started SpaceX, or Space Exploration Technologies Corp., and co-founded electric car giant Tesla Motors Inc. in Palo Alto, Calif.
In August, he unveiled plans for a mass-transit system called the Hyperloop, which would take paying passengers from Los Angeles to San Francisco in 30 minutes.
Having a fully functional submersible car would be a tall order. For the movie, producers had several Lotuses modified to appear as a self-propelled submarine.
In the famous sequence, Bond plunges the car into the water to evade an evildoer in a helicopter - black, of course. As the car submerges, the wheels draw into the body and it sprouts fins from the side panels. Then Bond launches a missile from the top of the car to blow the chopper to bits.
Musk did not say whether it would have weapons capabilities.
