Rowan Atkinson, the guy who plays Mr. Bean, bought a McLaren F1 in 1997 for £640,000, about a million dollars then. He drove it 41,000 miles, crashed it twice, and sold it in 2015 for £8 million.
The 2011 crash near Peterborough threw the V12 engine 20 metres from the wreckage, and the £910,000 payout to rebuild it was Britain's largest single-car insurance claim at the time. Even with that, profit hit roughly £7 million. Atkinson said most of those miles were "going to Sainsbury's or doing the school run."
Atkinson is a trained engineer. He earned an electrical engineering degree from Newcastle University in 1975, then a master's in the same field from The Queen's College, Oxford in 1978. His father had studied at the same college back in 1935.
His thesis was on something called self-tuning control. In plain English, that means any system smart enough to adjust its own settings while it runs, without a person standing there tweaking dials. Aircraft autopilots work this way. Paper mills and chemical plants do too. Other engineers cited his thesis in a 1979 paper published by the Institution of Electrical Engineers.
Atkinson told The Arts Desk the thesis was "good enough for an MSc but not good enough for a DPhil," which is Oxford's name for a PhD. He had wanted the doctorate. Comedy at the Oxford Revue kept pulling him out of the lab. He left with the master's, which he called "a quite rare degree at Oxford." Decades later, in 2006, Oxford made him an Honorary Fellow of the same college he had walked away from to do Mr. Bean.
The engineering brain never switched off. For years he wrote technical car columns for Car magazine, Octane, and Evo, getting into how cars actually behave on the road with the precision of someone trained in control systems.
The meme has the master's from Oxford right. The rest of the story: a published engineering thesis other engineers cited, a PhD he was on track to finish before comedy took over, an Honorary Fellowship he picked up decades later, and one of the most complicated production cars ever built used as a daily driver for the school run.
King Charles to Donald Trump:
“You recently commented, Mr. President, that if it were not for the United States, European countries would be speaking German. Dare I say that if it wasn't for us, you'd be speaking French.”
Touché