Robert Herjavec Knows How to Win Friends and, More Importantly, Porsches

The Porsche 911 is one of the most revered sports cars of all time, its legend only increasing as it enters its seventh decade of continuous production. September marks the 60th anniversary of the first example rolling off the line, so we’re sharing personal stories from a collection of owners: first, Robert Herjavec and his 2019 Porsche 911 Speedster.

“Do you know who I am?” It’s a line that causes secondhand embarrassment every time it’s uttered, whether by a TikToker attempting to score a table at Carbone or a minor celebrity sweet-talking their way out of some infraction. But businessman Robert Herjavec, a household name thanks to his 15-year tenure as a “shark” on ABC’s Shark Tank, was able to find at least one instance when the expression is not only appropriate, but encouraged.

“I realized every car manufacturer makes these limited cars and by the time the public knows about it, they’re already gone, so it’s one of the few shameless areas where I flaunt my celebrity,” Herjavec, who won his first Emmy for Shark Tank on Saturday, tells InsideHook. “With most things, I don’t give a shit about my celebrity and would never throw it in someone’s face. But you could be a car manufacturer and within the first two minutes I will be telling you, ‘I’ve been on Shark Tank for 20 years. Do you know who I am?’”

He says this with an easy smile and a chuckle. Herjavec’s affable demeanor — which has made him a viewer favorite not only on Shark Tank in the U.S., but on the Australia and Canadian editions of the entrepreneurial reality show, too — comes across instantly, even during a Zoom interview. It’s no wonder he’s been able to make all the right friends who have enabled his enviable automotive collection, a personal obsession that currently sits around 35 vehicles…and counting.

“I keep buying cars,” he laughs, shaking his head. “I keep saying I’m going to liquidate!”

Thankfully, he doesn’t cop out with the line that collectors tend to employ when asked to talk about their most treasured possessions: It’s like choosing a favorite child. Herjavec definitely has his favorites, one of them being his white 2019 Porsche 911 Speedster, a limited-edition version of the 991-generation 911, of which just 1,948 were ever made.

“If I had to, God forbid, ever whittle down my car collection,” he says, “I think the Speedster’s one of the handful of cars I would keep.”

This modern Porsche rises to the top even among a stockpile of vehicular icons that includes such rarities as a 1959 Porsche 356 A with a four-cam engine, a 2020 Ford GT and a 1956 Ford Thunderbird once owned by Frank Sinatra. But it’s not the Porsche’s exclusive nature or even its double-take good looks — with its signature “humpback” — that make the 911 Speedster one of his most prized assets. In fact, part of its appeal to Herjavec is that it’s not as eye-catching as some of his more exotic fare, even though it was designed as a 70th-anniversary tribute to the first official car created by Porsche, the 356 No. 1 Roadster of 1948.

“There are cars that I drive everyday if I have time, and the Speedster is that,” he says. “I also love that it’s not in your face. I love the Ferraris, I love the Lamborghinis, I love my Ford GT, but I don’t want everybody approaching me about the car. I just want to drive. And there’s just something about the Porsche driving experience. It’s very, very unique.”

Herjavec actually has the driving chops to honestly differentiate the performance and handling between one meticulously designed sports car and the next. For years he raced cars “all over the world,” most notably in the Ferrari Challenge Series, where he was able to push these ludicrously powerful vehicles, and his own driving skills, to their limits. You can’t say that about most celebrities who own Ferraris.

“In my old office we had a whole wall of race car parts,” says Herjavec, who apart from his Emmy-winning TV career is also chief executive of cybersecurity firm Cyderes. “Customers would see it and they’d say, ‘Wow, that was a bad crash.’ And I’m like, ‘Which one?’ Because each of those parts are from a different crash. As my friends always say, I never actually raced cars, I crashed cars.”

There it is again, that twinkle in Herjavec’s eye. While he’s happy to admit that his celebrity status opens certain doors in the car world, when it comes to adding the Speedster to his collection, it turns out it was his gregariousness, not his ever-growing fame, which got him access to that particular limited-edition Porsche.

“My neighbor in Newport owns a Porsche dealership, and when I moved in and found that out, I decided to be very, very nice to him,” he says with a laugh. “I just asked him for a favor, and he got it for me.”

Herjavec doesn’t find himself rowing through the Speedster’s six-speed manual transmission much these days as he recently moved to Australia, the home country of his wife Kym Johnson-Herjavec, where it’s “really hard to import cars,” but many of the blissful drives he’s taken in it are seared into his memory.

“I drove it from L.A. down to 17-Mile Drive in Pebble. Not for the Pebble Beach Concours, but just to drive it,” he says of a scenic route on California’s Monterey Peninsula. “For me, the ultimate great day is when I’m having a run or a drive and there’s this zen moment. I call it life-affirming. I remember so clearly driving down 17-Mile Drive with the Speedster, nobody around me, there’s a deer over on my right and the sun is shining and the pine needles are flying. And I’m like, man, it is really good to be alive.”

He’ll have the chance to get reacquainted with his beloved Speedster and the howl of its four-liter naturally-aspirated boxer engine this month as he’s be back in California. The trip is partly for the Emmy Awards, where Shark Tank won Outstanding Structured Reality Program, with Herjavec scoring hardware as an executive producer; and partly to pick up his latest car: a Rolls-Royce Spectre, that hallowed marque’s first electric vehicle.

“Jay Leno’s a good friend of mine,” Herjavec says casually, which won’t surprise anyone who watches Jay Leno’s Garage. “I was just hanging out with him a month ago. If you asked Jay Leno, out of the 650 cars in your garage, what’s your favorite? He would say to you, ‘The Rolls-Royce Spectre.’”

Oh, and it’s not just the $420,000 Rolls-Royce EV Herjavec is adding to his personal garage. In October, the same month that Shark Tank will return for its 16th season, he is heading to Germany to pick up yet another limited-edition vehicle: the Mercedes-AMG One, a long-awaited hypercar that will be limited to 275 models. Another buyer in that exclusive owners’ club, according to Herjavec? Michael Jordan.

So much for liquidating.