BERLIN: The world’s richest person Elon Musk says he has sold out of Burnt Hair, his newly announced perfume being marketed as the “essence of repugnant desire”.

The apparent joke perfume cost US$100 or €105 a bottle, making it perhaps the world’s most expensive perfume to have an offensive and off-putting name.

Nevertheless, Musk said on Oct 19 he had sold 30,000 bottles of the fragrance, or the equivalent of US$3mil in sales, barely a week after announcing the product to his 109 million followers on Twitter.

Musk, the tech innovator behind SpaceX, Tesla and other enterprises, has been selling the perfume in the of his tunnel construction project, The Boring Company.

Tongue-in-cheek marketing talked up the scent as being “just like leaning over a candle at the dinner table, but without all the hard work”.

Delivery dates have not yet been set and little information is given about the fragrance, which first went on sale on Oct 12. The company is instead leaving it to the celebrity billionaire’s cult status to do the promotion.

Musk, who wields massive influence on markets with his 109 million followers on Twitter, whom he has been accused of trolling, previously prompted bumps in cryptocurrencies and a racketeering lawsuit after lending his support to Dogecoin on Twitter.

Burnt Hair is not the Boring Company’s first novelty product, and Musk previous sold a reported 20,000 flamethrowers through the same website.

 - dpa