Elon Musk cleaned out manure tanks for a while in Canada if I'm not mistaking. There are some interviews where he talks about this (and showering at the gym across the street and sleeping under a desk and having no money) in quite some detail.
It's easier to take risks when you have an out when it all goes really wrong. Doubt he'd still be cleaning manure today if he hadn't had a success...
"But still you'll never get it right/'Cause when you're laying in bed at night/Watching roaches climb the wall/If you called your dad he could stop it all."
> Standing with the cash in his hand, Errol was made another offer he couldn't refuse: Would he like to buy half an emerald mine for half of his new riches?
> "I said, 'Oh, all right'. So I became a half owner of the mine, and we got emeralds for the next six years."
https://www.news24.com/news24/bi-archive/how-elon-musks-fami...
> Chasing "Get Rich Quick" schemes is not typically a sign of wealth.
I've found it to be pretty common. The amount of dumb money seeking 'easy' ways to multiply flowing around silicon valley kind of defines the place.
The story of how he even got to own the mine sounds pretty wild:
“According to the story, in the mid-1980s, Errol and a copilot landed their plane near Lake Tanganyika in Zambia, where "a group of Italians" offered them 80,000 pounds in British currency in order to buy the plane.
Standing with the cash in his hand, Errol was made another offer he couldn't refuse: Would he like to buy half an emerald mine for half of his new riches?
"I said, 'Oh, all right'. So I became a half owner of the mine, and we got emeralds for the next six years."”
It proceeds to say he made about $400000 from the mine in total - hardly a billionaire villain level money.
https://www.snopes.com/news/2022/11/17/elon-musk-emerald-min...
I think the null hypothesis that Musk got lucky in the dotcom era is pretty reasonable, lots of people did. I don’t get all the conspiracy theories.
Just to clarify for anyone else wondering, that’s 400,000USD inflation adjusted for 2021. Converted to South African rand, it’s about 7.2 million.
To put that in context, the average home price in South Africa is about a million rand. So at most they would have been able to buy 7 properties. If they bought in an expensive area, they likely would have only been able to afford 4 or 5.
> To put that in context, the average home price in South Africa is about a million rand. So at most they would have been able to buy 7 properties
That’s... not how averages work.
(If the minimum price was a million rand, then 7 would be the maximum.)