If you ordered a bottle of Elon Musk’s “Burnt Hair” perfume in October, it’s finally arriving at your doorstep this week. And if you aren’t interested in smelling like “the essence of repugnant desire,” you can sell the fragrance on eBay for a significant profit.
With a last name like “Musk” and a serial entrepreneur reputation, it only makes sense that the Tesla Inc (NASDAQ: TSLA) CEO would foray into the fragrance industry.
The billionaire runs several popular companies including Tesla, SpaceX, The Boring Company and Neuralink. He also purchased social media platform Twitter late last year.
His companies are known for offering some of the coolest and often peculiar products in their merchandise stores. Tesla did a limited run of surfboards in 2018 and briefly listed limited-edition red satin shorts in 2020, which many assumed to be a shot at short sellers of Tesla stock.
Tesla also sold its own tequila in a bottle shaped like a lightning bolt and then famously launched the Cyberwhistle in 2021 and listed the product for sale on the site in Dogecoin (CRYPTO: DOGE) during the last crypto bull run.
More recently, SpaceX released a Starship Torch. It’s still available for pre-order, listed at $175 on the SpaceX site. But maybe the most popular item ever released by a Musk-run company was another flame-related product called “Not-A-Flamethrower.”
The Boring Company-branded flamethrower sold out of 20,000 units for $500 each pretty quickly. They demand high premiums on EBay Inc (NASDAQ: EBAY) to this day. Just this month, several of them sold for between $1,000 and $1,600.
The “Burnt Hair” perfume is a follow-up product to the “Not-A-Flamethrower” release.
“Burnt Hair – scent for men by Singed. Coming soon from @boringcompany, the same people that sold you a Flamethrower,” Musk tweeted last September.
The product went on sale for $100 on Oct. 11, 2022 and sold out within 48 hours. If you were one of the 30,000 to order a bottle, you may have finally received your burning delivery this week.
The product took longer than expected to hit customer doorsteps. In an email update from March, The Boring Company said the product took extra time to develop because the team had to wait for their hair to grow back to resume testing. The string of emails sent to customers over the last nine months was filled with puns and playful jokes.
“Anybody who truly nose about Burnt Hair will tell you that this fancy bottle and repugnant perfume is very close to being scent to you,” the company said in another update.
A card that was packaged with the bottle of perfume says, “Hey there, smokeshow. Congratulations on your purchase of Burnt Hair! It’s going to be lit.”
“But not (lit)erally … flip over this card for some boring legal language about flammability.”
Now that customers have the long-awaited bottles in hand, they are starting to pop up on eBay and are selling between $130 and $200 per bottle on average, with some going for as high as $300.
You could at least expect to get $150 for the product, which represents a 50% return in just nine months — a great investment by most measures. In fact, the bottles have appreciated more than Tesla stock over that time.
If you bought a share of Tesla on Oct. 11 instead of the perfume, it would have cost you between $215 and $225 that day. With the stock hovering around $272 per share at last check, the Tesla investment would have given you a return of approximately 21% to 27% depending on the price you paid in October.
By buying a bottle of “Burnt Hair” you could have more than doubled your returns. Musk’s perfume definitely smells like burnt something, but not money.
Produced in association with Benzinga
Edited by Alberto Arellano and Joseph Hammond
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