From wikipedia:
"The family was very wealthy in Elon's youth; Errol Musk once said, 'We had so much money at times we couldn't even close our safe.'"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk#Childhood_and_family
We have a pretty good idea what Errol's net worth is, and it's a couple million bucks.
The emerald mine in question was purchased for the equivalent of $40,000.
I should note that my working definition of "wealthy" doesn't mean they never have to work again, or don't have to work to maintain their desired lifestyle. Other people may have different benchmarks. As you said, abstract measures aren't easily quantified, and someone else's benchmark for wealthy may be higher.
This describes many boomers that simply own a house.
It most assuredly does not.
https://www.businessinsider.com/typical-baby-boomer-net-wort...
That's not mathematically logical. 'Average' can be used to describe mean, median or mode.
So median is the relevant interpretation of average in that context. Your correction and interpretation are valid.
Someone makes an implication that they were fabulously wealthy, using abstract measures like emerald mines, or small planes as a substitute for a concrete measure of wealth.
Someone points out the value of both those things was actually quite low.
Then the goal posts shift to how much more money the Musk family had than the average family, which is true enough.
But they were still decidedly middle class. They all had to work for a living. And in American terms, there are tens of millions of households with similar wealth. Upper middle class, to be sure, but nothing unusual.
And the emerald mine, such as it was, is said to have been in Zambia, not South Africa.
There's hardly a move of goalpost here. People merely argue that showing Elon as self-made "in parent's garage" is bullshit. He had family with capabilities to enable him to participate in ecoms bubble.
> Zambia, not South Africa
"You are wrong, that labour camp wasn't in USSR but in North Korea." I've haven't named the country BTW.
In the US, there are 13.6 million households with a net worth over $1 million when excluding their primary residence, out of a total of 126 million households.
Over 10% of households in the US, even when excluding the value of their home, have over a million dollars in assets.
There is a good reason why the family left SA the moment apartheid was abolished and why Elon Musk never went back since the end of apartheid.
Every entitled chuckle-duck born with a silver spoon in their mouth likes to launder their past to make them look self-made. Elon is no different.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treasure_Islands:_Tax_Havens_a...
People WANT to believe a mythology that Elon started off rich to feel better about not accomplishing anything with their own equally or more privileged life. People that started with little themselves don't have this level of cognitive dissonance and see it more as an immigrant success story and inspiration.
The biggest privilege is having your family's security net, even if you don't use it. Musk has also had luck, being in the right time and place for the dot-com boom. Unlike a lot of people who grew up privileged, he's been a hustler with great business instincts. Unlike a lot of hustlers with great business instincts, he grew up privileged.
Could the average American in 1995 give a $28,000 loan to his kid? Median net worth was ~$100,000 in today’s dollars. If ‘privilege’ has negative connotations for you, use ‘luck’ instead. I don’t think there’s any question that Musk made some of his own luck through hard work and intelligence, but we often observe the rich with survivorship bias because it would upset the social order if we stopped believing that hard work and intelligence are enough to become rich.
What does this sentence mean, why’d he need a second computer? Parsing out the odd wording that means he could afford a computer
What’s with the second computer? It’s proper nerd sniped me this haha
He left South Africa at 17 with no money to speak of. He's estranged from his father for reasons no one talks about, which makes the father's possible wealth irrelevant.
And yet this "apartheid emerald mine fortune" is such a good story that it will keep being "internet true" forever.
https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/wikipedias-jewish-problem-pe...
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/former-wikipedia-edi...
https://www.amazon.com/Elon-Musk-SpaceX-Fantastic-Future/dp/...
https://savingjournalism.substack.com/p/i-talked-to-elon-mus...
This is a laughable statement. That's assuming the newspapers acting as sources are devoid of bias, while we clearly know that they are partisan in the own right: even stuff that the NYT is heavily biased and can't be seriously used as a reference for everything.
Crowd-sourcing is not a robust mechanism to prevent that from happening either. Just look at every controversial topic on Wikipedia, there is only one narrative that is accepted while the reality might be way more complex that what is portrayed in a paragraph.
For any popular topic, there are self-appointed watchdogs who will revert edits in bad faith and argue with you on the Talk page until you give up and go away. There aren't enough admins to adjudicate all disputes, so what you're reading on a controversial topic is often the product of the most stubborn arguers.
That's how the sausage is made on WP.
Attacking the very idea that it's even possible to know the truth is what you do when the truth isn't on your side.
I'm sure many HN regulars have homes costing much more than a safe full of $13 notes.
I wouldn't be too confident that "We had so much money at times we couldn't even close our safe." is an amount of money that would actually make someone particularly wealthy by American standards without doing a fair bit of research on what currency that safe would have been full of and how much it had been worth at the time.