Hacker News Reader

Comment by saberience | Hacker News Reader

The "Elon had it easy because he had a fortune from emerald mining" is total bollocks. He was certainly not "rich" when he came to US and was in university here, and when he badly needed money at the beginning of Tesla and SpaceX there was certainly no secret backup of "Emerald Mine" money.

I'm not sure where this rubbish conspiracy came from but if there was Emerald Mine money there wasn't much of it. You may not like to hear it, but Elon's big start came from the success of X and Paypal which then bankrolled the beginnings of SpaceX and Tesla, it wasn't from a rich daddy.

View on HN

You're correct that Musk isn't a "billionaire heir to an emerald mine" but his own father has said the emerald mine was real and that it helped pay Musk's living expenses at college:

> Errol went as far as to say that emerald money paid for his son's move to the US, where Elon would go on to attend the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton Business School on scholarship — with, apparently, emerald-generated cash in his pocket for living expenses.

https://futurism.com/elon-musk-dad-emerald-mine

> when he badly needed money at the beginning of Tesla and SpaceX there was certainly no secret backup of "Emerald Mine" money

That's not personal wealth, that's company investment. Just because you (or your family) doesn't have spare money kicking around to finance a space rocket company doesn't mean that you're not personally rich and able to pay for things "regular" folks cannot and have connections they don't.

Am I rich because I've funded a 529 plan for my kids? This story is way overblown.

I funded a 529 plan with $40,000 19 years ago. It lost money.

529s are a fucking scam.

I'm starting to feel the same, honestly. Do you know if it was just your plan or is there something where I can find more info showing how these are not smart investments?

They are not smart investments because you have no control over where the money is pointed in the plan.

So if you call your advisor, and say "i want my 529 to only focus on X" they tell you that you have no control over the index and the plan will be the most conservative 50-year-old actuary data which has no fucking clue where the market is heading and then berate you for when their 529 index loses value...

I was ready to pay that investment banker's family a personal visit with skills that I have accumulated over a number of decades.

This is not true in most states. My 529 is just a normal investment account like my ira.

Any investment that includes stock can go down in value. That doesn't make it a scam.

Crazy, what did you invest it in?

How? The market has generally risen since then

Well, 529s are a good way to avoid capital gains taxes on investments dedicated for education. In your case, they wanted to be extra sure that you would avoid capital gains taxes, so they lost money.

I'm more than a little curious on this one. How did you lose money in a 529? Are you saying you lost opportunity cost of having put that money somewhere else?

In 2004 VTI was about $55. It's now $200. On a 19-year time frame a broad market index fund like VTI is the only thing you ought to have been invested in.

Perhaps the scam is when banks let people choose their own investments rather than have it be fully managed.

The thing was that it was invested by family, in banks that failed, and failed and failed... being collapsed and bought/bailed out through the rape...

And so the account ended up continually ending up in the hands of even seedier banksters....

I didnt discover this until after my grandmother passed, and I was able to trace it back through various funds - and they just raped the account...

I don't know what 529 you guys invested in but Utah's 529 which anyone can use whether or not they live in Utah allows you to invest in regular old Vanguard funds like VSTSX. They also offer target dates funds that handle gradually shifting to a more conservative allocation as enrollment date nears if that's what you want.

I agree that not all 529s are good, only 2 plans received a gold rating from Morningstar in 2022: Utah & Michigan. I wouldn't choose anything other than those.

Bullshit. 529 plans are great for tax avoidance. If you picked the wrong plan, or the wrong investments within that plan, then that's on you. Try a reputable, low-cost plan from a company like Vanguard.

What did you invest in? If you just did S&P 500 it would have gone up pretty significantly.

This thread is a good example of how silly the debate has gotten.

"You're trying to tell me Musk's family is rich? He couldn't even pay for SpaceX himself, how could he be rich?!"

"I've put away some cash for my child to go to college, are you saying I'm as rich as Elon Musk?!"

It's all just so ridiculous. A lot of people here seem convinced that there are only two arguments to be made: that Musk is a spoiled trust fund baby that deserves no credit for everything, or that Musk was a hard-scrabble self-starter that did everything on his own. Maybe, just maybe the truth is somewhere in the middle?

You're suggesting that Elon Musk has family wealth because his father funded his living expenses in college.

@deelowe points out that they're also saving to fund their child's expenses in college.

Therefore, you're either suggesting that @deelowe has family wealth or you're arguing in bad faith.

I'm not arguing in bad faith. I'm making specific points that, for reasons unknown, @deelowe and yourself are making a wider inference from.

The post I replied to said:

> I'm not sure where this rubbish conspiracy came from but if there was Emerald Mine money there wasn't much of it.

My reply clarified that there was indeed an emerald mine (according to Musk's father) and that it paid for his college living expenses. I then went on to say that an inability to pay for SpaceX does not mean you are "not rich".

> you're either suggesting that @deelowe has family wealth or you're arguing in bad faith.

But that's silly too. With no numbers attached "family wealth" doesn't mean anything. Almost all families have "family wealth", if anything the bad faith argument here is trying to suggest that all wealth is somehow equal.

You'll note in my original reply I didn't even say that Elon's family was inordinately wealthy, just that the mine was real and that it paid for his college. Any "bad faith" on top of that is your own interpretation, not my words.

IIRC the claim is that Musk’s dad’s share was worth 50 grand USD when he bought it. There are individual emeralds worth that much. It likely wasn’t much of a mine if it did exist. A tiny artisanal mine.

> It's all just so ridiculous.

And yet so fascinating, and ubiquitous.

Human consciousness is a hell of a drug.

I think the point is the only evidence that you provided for the argument that “Musk got his wealth from his family’s emerald mine” is that his parents paid for his college expenses. And that is, in my and many others minds, is a pathetically weak argument.

Full disclosure - my parents paid for a lot of my college expenses. At least half of the people who go to Ivy leagues have parents that will pay for their college expenses. It’s almost entirely, if not completely irrelevant to his work at PayPal, the founding of SpaceX, and the building of Tesla.

So it’s baffling (to me, at least) that it keeps getting brought up as a reason to hate Elon Musk. It feels that people want to find reasons to deeply hate this person, and they through anything they possibly can against him, nonsensical or not.

> I think the point is the only evidence that you provided for the argument that “Musk got his wealth from his family’s emerald mine”

But at no point was I making that argument. The OP suggested (as Musk has many times) that the mine literally didn't exist. I was simply pointing out that according to his father it very much did exist and paid for Elon's college.

You might be rich if you funded the 529 plan with proceeds from your emerald mine. Outside of that scenario, your kids' 529 plan doesn't really have anything to do with this.

How much money you have makes you rich or not rich, not where it came from.

Yes, that was my point.

Someone with an ownership stake in a mine that produces material with a variety of industrial and commercial uses is not necessarily rich. But that person is in a relatively tiny group compared to the group containing all parents who are able to contribute to their children's educational expenses. And the "owns <part of> a mine" group's average net worth is probably a fair bit higher than that of the "can contribute to the kid's college" group.

Hence, if you own an emerald mine, you might be rich.

And if you own a failed emerald mine you might be poor. If you own an emerald mine that just barely broke even (admittedly that is a bit unlikely), you might end up middle class in the end. Of course you can also end up being obscenely wealthy from such a venture.

I don't think anyone is suggesting elon musk rose from being a homeless person to a billionaire. I guess this internet dispute is whether he made his own money, or inherieted it (e.g. like trump). Whether or not his parents owned an emerald mine doesn't really shed much light on that debate. Its entirely possible they were moderately wealthy but the emerald mine wasn't super lucrative and musk still made money mostly by means of his own combination of skill and luck.

"Regarding the so-called “emerald mine”, there is no objective evidence whatsoever that this mine ever existed. He told me that he owned a share in a mine in Zambia, and I believed him for a while, but nobody has ever seen the mine, nor are there any records of its existence." - Elon Musk, https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1654971702571331584

"I will pay a million Dogecoin for proof of this mine’s existence!" - https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1646272562488569857

I was always confused because it seemed like his dad bought a handful of shares in a mining company and people think this means he owns it? Like if I went and bought 10 shares of Apple suddenly Tim Cook is answering to me? Elon seems to have had a nice upper-middle class/lower end rich childhood, but from what I've been able to discover he's not some trust fund baby. He wasn't the money guy at Paypal I don't think, but he did manage to turn his Paypal money into successful car and rocket companies.

The high school he went to is private and not cheap. But it's not the you-have-to-own-a-mine type of place.

I don't get why people argue like this. It's so obviously disingenuous. Owning a share of an emerald mine doesn't make your family super rich and it's obviously, demonstrably, not where Musk's wealth comes from.

Musk's wealth is well documented. It comes from founding and selling a series of companies - not an emerald mine. Repeating the emerald mine meme is just a way to declare yourself a dishonest participant in the conversation - or perhaps you genuinely think you can fool people with obvious lies?

The apparent existence of the emerald mine does put some shade on musk's purely "self-made" story. Even though, in reality, no one is truly, completely self made. But Musk has fully denied the existence of an emerald mine. But now his father confirmed it. So I don't think we can trust Musk's account here and I'm not sure we can trust his father's. So I think it remains to be seen how much family money supported Elon while he became "self-made".

The evidence we have is his father claiming to have helped his sons out to the tune of $115k and said father becoming essentially bankrupt in the 90s.

The Emerald mine denial was shady and dishonest, Elon probably thinking he can get away with it as "technically correct" because there was no actual mine that anyone can point to, just paying locals for any emeralds they have found lying around.

Elon seems about as self made as you can get in the USA, with the approximate amount of support you'd expect from an upper middle class family (helping pay for college and a small $28k business loan).

Where does Musk claim to be purely self-made?

The first company, Zip2, was started with $28k of his dad's money.

If he hadn't been given that, he might not have been in a position to sell Zip2 for a massive profit during the dotcom boom. That sale is what made Elon personally very wealthy.

Where did the $28k come from? How much money did Elon's dad provide for his living expenses, international moves, etc while going through college and the Zip2 startup? Where did that money come from?

The $28 was a small portion of a second round of funding (and was a loan). Not really a make or break amount.

> How much money did Elon's dad provide for his living expenses, international moves, etc while going through college and the Zip2 startup?

The Sun Errol interview answers that. About half of $115k (as he had to split it with his brother).

Musk's father invested 20-30k in Zip2 out of a 200k angel investment. That doesn't seem like a huge deal to me. For context, Musk dropped out of a grad program at Stanford to pursue Zip2. How many Stanford graduate students could raise 30k from their parents for a business venture?

As for where the money came from, I believe Musk's father owned an engineering business. Or maybe it was profits from a share in an emerald mine - what does that matter though?

I don't get why people argue like this. It's so obviously disingenuous. Owning a share of an emerald mine makes your means your family is somewhat rich maybe not filthy rich but rich enough to own a share of an emerald mine, which trust me, isn't cheap.

You have no idea how large a share it is or how large a mine it is. You simply discredit yourself and your arguments by assuming things without evidence. The description of the mine I'm aware of comes from Erol Musk where he says he traded a used plane that he had bought for 50k for 120k plus a share of a mine. Musk describes the mine as "a deposit in the middle of nowhere rather than a modern mine" [1].

So, he has an unknown share of a mine of dubious value. "Trust me, that isn't cheap." I think you've done a very good job of explaining why people shouldn't trust you, because, unbothered by a lack of knowledge you are happy to leap to conclusions.

1 - https://www.the-sun.com/news/8014711/elon-musk-dad-errol-cha...

About 60% of households in the U.S. are living paycheck to paycheck according to Google. Most families don't have an extra 50K just lying around to invest in a mine If your family does ave that, I'm guessing you're. well off. Maybe not filthy rich, but well off.

Mining companies are on stock exchanges, you can buy shares in them and their mines for dollars each, or even cents each, depending on the company.

> I don't get why people argue like this. It's so obviously disingenuous. Owning a share of an emerald mine doesn't make your family super rich and it's obviously, demonstrably, not where Musk's wealth comes from.

Interestingly, the intelligence level of the observer very often seems to have no effect. It's a very interesting phenomenon, I simply can't understand why humanity essentially ignores it.

Errol claims they sold two emeralds randomly for ~$1000, which was then listed for a 10x markup, certainly a far cry from the "low quality emeralds" Elon stated. So we already see three things here: access to your investment's goods, a nonchalance about emerald access, and Elon attempting to downplay.

According to Federal Reserve, only ~15% of American families directly hold any stock. We're not even talking about direct investments to a private company here and the % is already low. There seems to be an inability to determine direct relationship from Errol to mine owner (to justify a very low investment at an early stage), so using logic, Errol passed some figure needed to gain any access. Likely not as high as people assume, but also not the nothing you've been attempting to brand it as in this thread.

The reason I'm calling out your lack of integrity is because you're attempting to shift discussion away from Elon's inability to be honest as the focus is on his upbringing, and instead trying to make this about his current forms of wealth. The latter of which, is not what people are discussing. Certainly you understand how peculiar this is correct? Defending someone by shifting focus to another topic and calling those you disagree with disingenuous while you do the same is a very good indication this is no longer rational for you, it's purely emotional.

You've already established your brazen disregard for the truth and ideological motivations - you don't need to keep demonstrating them.

That someone might've marked up a couple emeralds Musk may have sold once (I believe the story is disputed) doesn't prove the quality of emeralds at the mine. Your point about Americans holding any stock is equally bizarre. "Directly" does a lot of work there, indirectly, it's closer to two thirds of American adults, so I'm not even sure what point you think you're making. Nobody, including Elon, disputes that his parents were relatively wealthy, so even if the 15% figure you're citing weren't misleading it would be irrelevant.

Your general pattern of argument here is to tell obvious lies and then, when confronted, to spin off on pointless digressions. Musk came from a relatively wealthy family - that was never disputed by anyone, Elon included, and it's obviously not the source of his present-day wealth. What I would like to return to is my original question of why you would do this? I mean, you understand this is totally transparent, right? I get why your politics or ideology might compel you to slander people you dislike, but why wouldn't you try to do a good job of it?

It’s incredibly disingenuous to suggest that the people who are invoking Musk’s emerald mine are actually complaining about the “cash in his pocket for living expenses.”

Musk’s parents helping with living expenses is actually the norm in America. Parents pay over 50% of the costs of tuition, room and board for American students: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-07-23/universit...

So the big question I think is who to trust here.

Here is his mother denying it: https://twitter.com/mayemusk/status/1654983542336520192

Here is Elon's story: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1654971702571331584

Here's a video of Elon back in the day on CNN talking about sleeping on the floor and buying his first expensive car with the money he was making from x.com and Justine Musk saying she fears they will become spoiled brats: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9mczdODqzo

So who to believe?

Believe elon's mother. Elon and his dad are nuts

toronto had widespread rent control since 1975 without means testing so what this really means is that they rented in toronto. wow, we are just beginning to peel back the layers on this!

I think that people get too visceral on this topic.

Elon has obviously managed to create incredibly successful businesses. And he is also from an upper class background, which makes things easier, but hey, doesn't mean he isn't talented and that he worked really hard to get where he is.

Another thing that also seems pretty obvious is that he wants to hide his privileged background. Here is an archived interview from Forbes where he openly talks about his father's private plane and the emerald mine:

https://web.archive.org/web/20140802011449/http://www.forbes...

I wouldn't call that lower middle class, not even upper middle.

Here is his father confirming it:

"Errol Musk Claims He Visited Emerald Mine With Son Elon" - https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/after-elon-musks-strong-deni....

"Elon Musk’s dad Errol says he can ‘prove’ existence of emerald mine in new bombshell claim revealing its location" - https://www.the-sun.com/news/7911051/elon-musks-dad-errol-em...

Go to the original source not the misleading futurism article that got made from it: https://www.the-sun.com/news/7911051/elon-musks-dad-errol-em...

This says that Errol claims he managed to give his two sons about $115k in total. Which makes sense given he got his Emerald mine share for less than that.

There's also literally zero evidence that Errol had any useful connections here.

It really irritates me how many myths float around because people cannot be bothered to go find the original sources...

My dad worked in the non-profit world making federal senior executive salary, and my mom made over $100k/year as a retail salesperson in a furniture store. My parents managed to pay about $300k in college tuition between me and my brother.

I’d never claim to be anything other than upper middle class (even though my dad grew up in a village in Bangladesh and his elementary school had no walls). But at the same time, if I became a billionaire it would be extremely disingenuous to imply that it was the result of family wealth. This level of family wealth is mundane in top American schools. The journalists whining about Musk almost certainly had similar support from their parents.

If you look at inflation calculator 115K in 1997 is worth 290K today. I don't know a single parent that would or could hand over that amount of cash in 97 or today. It's wealthly regardless of how you slice it.

It's definitely closer to "doctor married a lawyer" levels of money than "single mother barista" levels of money, but "wealthy" normally implies enough money to live comfortably without working, not upper middle class.

For context, a doctor and lawyer family in a state capital will earn $2-3m per decade, which is MUCH more than any reasonable estimates of the Musk family's wealth or income.

I earn 2-3M per decade not including investments or IPO. I've sent multiple children to a University. Giving my children 60K-290K in cash while they were studying is not something that crossed my mind once. In fact I would argue you're supposed to struggle a little bit in college.

According to Elon's dad, he was rich:

‘I drove them to school in a convertible Rolls-Royce Corniche, they had thoroughbred horses to ride and motorbikes at the age of 14. They were spoilt, I suppose. Maybe that’s why Elon is acting like a spoilt child now,’.

my parents helped pay some of my college expenses, and they didnt have an emerald mine

this is extremely common for young adults

"Heir to an emerald mine" is intended to paint a very specific picture, and "some occasional spending cash from a handshake claim to a chunk of namibian rock outcropping (if we believe a man who doesn't exactly present as super trustworthy)" is definitely not it.

I'm no fan of Musk, but I'm even less a fan of being intentionally misleading.

Which is why my comment literally started with:

> You're correct that Musk isn't a "billionaire heir to an emerald mine"

This is certainly the image he would love people to have: a humble immigrant from the poor South Africa, hustling his way into the American dream.

The reality is that he is from a wealthy, well-connected, post-apartheid white family. They funded his coming to Canada, the US, University, and getting first business off the ground. The reality is that he has had a silver spoon his entire life.

Who cares?

Musk certainly does.

Let me be more specific: why do the people speaking out about his "fortunate" past care so much? As long as it didn't come from something unethical, why does it matter to you?

I don't want read between the lines, but it's hard not to think it's a way for people to feel better about their own accomplishments by saying someone else had a massive head start.

Whether others do or don't, we should all be trying our best, be grateful for what we have, and proud of where we came from.

There are at least two big points for people to care about.

The money did come from something unethical--his family was enriched by segregation; racism; apartheid. That emerald money is dirty and is likely a key reason why Elon would deny its existence.

This brings us to the second thing: Elon lying about this. He has demonstrated that he is willing to lie about something this significant, which should do real damage to his credibility and trustworthiness if we are being logical and objective. What else is he willing to lie about?

Is there any business one could have owned in southern Africa as a white person during that period that you wouldn’t rule as tainted and unethical?

Nope, they also conviently leave out that Errol was an anti-apartheid member of a city council and actively tried to abloish Apartheid. If Errol is to be believed, his role in the history of Apartheid is probably the most commendable thing about him.

The Emerald mine money (whatever small amount it was, likely under $70k given that seems to be the value of the plane he traded for the share) came from Zimbabwe. Its cleaner that Errol's propery money.

And Elon was misleading and disingenuous but could still make a case that he hasn't explicitly lied on these things.

> As long as it didn't come from something unethical

Ahhh, those historic pillars of morals and ethics, sub-Saharan Africa precious stone mines...

Not to defend him, but having your parents pay for your education is hardly a rare circumstance. It's not the case for everyone, sure, but it is for plenty of ordinary people. I don't understand why Musk is supposed to be outstanding in this regard.

I think the way to take this comment is "He didn't pull himself up by his own bootstraps. And people need to stop pretending like any of his history means that he did."

Maybe not rare in a very small bubble. That bubble of graduates, for example. But certainly rare given the entire world population. And even rare, within a generic western, white, culture (hardly a fraction goes to university of those, let alone being paid for it by family).

Being born with privilege is not a choice, and so you are right people should not be shamed for that. The problem is something else. Details here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35919637

but having your parents pay for your education is hardly a rare circumstance.

Having your father pay for Wharton Business School isn't the same thing as having your father pay for the College of New Jersey.

His father claims to have given $115k to his two sons, with the rest being them working and getting student loans.

"having your parents pay for your education is hardly a rare circumstance" - What is your source for this? Why do you think the President wanted to forgive student loan if paying for education was not such a big problem?

Median American household income is $70k before taxes. Do you think this household can afford college tuition and expenses?

That’s not the median income of households with college-aged kids. On average parents pay over half of tuition and living expenses for children: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-07-23/universit...

It’s fair to say Elon’s family wasn’t poor. But the level of support he got wasn’t any more than the typical journalist who is criticizing him.

Taking a loan is not the same as able to afford it. 40% of the households with college aged kids earn less than 74k. https://www.statista.com/statistics/782411/parental-income-o...

Also it's insane to compare Elon's family with a Journalist. Elon's father invested $200k for 10% in his first venture while half the journalist earn less than 50k. https://www.bls.gov/ooh/media-and-communication/reporters-co...

And the median family income of a U Penn undergraduate is almost $200,000 annually. Heck at Georgia Tech, where I went, it’s $130,000, and almost 1/4 of the students come from the top 5%. To put it another way—Musk’s level of family support is hardly unusual compared to that of the thousands of engineers who work for him.

Journalism at the national level is extremely competitive, and draws from a highly credentialed talent pool. The reason people with such credentials pursue such a low paying job is because their families are often quite affluent—they are often doctors, lawyers, etc.

Two thirds of Americans don't have a college degree. The most common professions in the country are clerk, cashier, food prep worker and truck driver. If your parents were able to pay for your university education you probably grew up at the upper end of the upper middle class, which is already a very lucky position to be in.

Ordinary people make about 35k per year, half make less. They're not paying for an expensive college education.

> Not to defend him, but having your parents pay for your education is hardly a rare circumstance.

This. Parents have worked their tails off to build a better life for their kids for millenia. Calling it a form of privilege seems like a gross misunderstanding of human behavior.

Hah. Spoken with privilege.

University is far more expensive today than back then, too. Ironically this supports your point in Elon’s case, but today it’s very much not a given that parents can even minimally help their kids get through college. My wife’s couldn’t.

He's outstanding because he cannot be honest about the situation. Even his father contradicts Elon's claims. Elon claims he was in 100k debt during schooling, it's revealed he had scholarships and his father paid living expenses. It's revealed his father had involvement with emerald mines, going as far as to state they were regularly sold for upwards of $500 a piece, Elon then claims he doesn't remember anything except seeing a small jewelry box filled with "low quality emeralds".

Do you sense the pattern? It would be as if Paris Hilton went around repeatedly saying she was dirt poor and used her galaxy sized brain to start her own business without any help. People would, obviously and quite reasonably, mock it for its absurdity. Yet when the same happens to Elon Musk, there are endless hysterical defenses ready. As if you are telling a child that Santa isn't real.

Yeah, and you had an authoctonous whose family bankrolled him all the way up to the White House and all you got was the Second Gulf War! And daddy’s boy even managed to drive into the ground all the businesses that he laid out for him to manage. Musk’s track record is at least better than that

People will a silver spoon their entire life usually don’t end up well. It’s why wealth typically leaves a family after only three generations.

This is bullshit.

There is no evidence his family was wealthy by American standards. Errol has claimed in the interview with the Sun to have helped his sons at uni to the tune of $115k and gave them a $28k loan (as part of a $200k round of seed funding) for their first business. The only sources on the emerald mine are the Musks, where the claim is they acquired a share of an informal mine by trading in a small plane they owned (likely a $70k Cessna). Errol Musk went bust in the 90s and there's no evidence of any other family wealth flowing to Elon.

There is no evidence they had any useful connections to speak of and no evidence any family gave more than a fraction of his uni (half of $115k) and business ($28k) funding.

People endlessly repeat random rumors they've heard which grow in the telling. People should go read the original sources wherever possible, such as the Sun article: https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/22104496/elon-musks-dad-errol-...

I'm a former Rhodesian (present day Zimbabwe) who moved to South Africa after things went south in Zim. For context, I'm white, so it's not like I have a racial gripe against Musk. Elon went to one of the fanciest private schools in the country's capital and lived in one of its richest suburbs. Yes, technically Boys High is a public school, but people from outside South Africa don't know what the Model C school policy was. His father was extraordinarily wealthy and if you do read interviews by both Elon and Errol, they both admit this. His mother was an international supermodel and his family was generally pretty well connected in the greater scheme of things. The entire story about him struggling during college (where he went to an Ivy League university paid for by his father) is complete bullshit. I don't dispute his ingenuity in starting Zip2 (funded by his father too by the way), but he wasn't starting from the bottom with no help - that's the grossly inaccurate part that Elon still pushes for optics and people who are too stupid or unaware of how SA works lap it up.

> Elon's big start came from the success of X and Paypal

Funny you mention this as why he was self-made, where by all accounts he was considered an awful coder in this Paypal position, and was only able to be in the country (illegally) at the time, or secure this job, was because of his family's money and connections.

can you post a link to one of the "all accounts" you're referring to?

I wouldn't say awful but it's clear that he and Max Levchin did not see eye to eye, at least judging from Levchin's interview in Founders At Work. Musk pushed for them to move from Unix to Windows and Levchin disagreed with that move.

> Musk pushed for them to move from Unix to Windows and Levchin disagreed with that move.

Because Musk's push came from no objective reason beyond he "didn't know it". The Board said "you're the CEO, you don't need to know all the technologies".

Max Levchinin in Founders At Work pag 7:

"...Peter took some time off. The guy who ran X.com became the CEO, and I remained the CTO. He was really into Windows, and I was really into Unix. So there was this bad blood for a while between the engineering teams. He was convinced that Windows was where it’s at and that we have to switch to Windows, but the platform that we used was, I thought, built really well and I wanted to keep it. I wanted to stay on Unix..."

"...I had this intern that I hired before the merger, and we thought, “We built all these cool Unix projects, but it’s kind of pointless now because they are going to scrap the platform. We might as well do something else.” So he and I decided we were going to find ourselves fun projects. We did one kind of mean project where we built a load tester package that would beat up on the Windows prototype (the next version was going to be in Windows). We built a load tester that would test against the Unix platform and the new Windows one and show in beautiful graphs that the Windows version had 1 percent of the scalability of the Unix one. “Do you really want to do that?”...

...It was me acting out, but it was kind of a low time for me because I was not happy with the way we were going..."

"...At the time, already I had hated the guy’s guts for forcing me to do Windows, and then, in the end, I was like, “You gotta go, man.” My whole argument to him was, “We can’t switch to Windows now. This fraud thing is most important to the company. You can’t allow any additional changes. It’s one of these things where you want to change one big thing at a time, and the fraud is a pretty big thing. So introducing a new platform or doing anything major—you just don’t want to do it right now.” That was sort of the trigger for a fairly substantial conflict that resulted in him leaving and Peter coming back and me taking over fraud...."

> considered an awful coder in this Paypal position

This is an odd criticism as he was the CEO of PayPal. Why would it be important if he was an awful coder or not?

I’m not a proponent of Musk but this seems like odd shade to throw on him.

He was CEO of X.com for less than a year and was fired by the board. Then they merged with the predecessor to PayPal, which was more successful. He become CEO of the merged company, but was again fired for poor technical decision making (among other things, he insisted that the company build on the Windows stack instead of Linux) before the company rebranded itself as PayPal.

So, technically he was never the CEO of "PayPal", just the company that became PayPal, and he got himself fired by the boards of both the companies that turned into PayPal. He retained 11% ownership of PayPal and ended up making a decent amount of money from the EBay acquisition.

And then he failed his way up with Tesla and SpaceX, two companies which were better off without his presence.

I sure I wish I was that incompetent.

I understand all that, my question was why would it matter if he was an awful coder. Or they people thought he was an awful coder.

It is objectively true that he was ceo of x.com and PayPal, but neither of those positions require coding skills.

I’m not defending Musk as a CEO or human or anything. I’m just curious why it matters to bring up people thought his coding sucked. Was he a good chef? Was he terrible at Mario Kart? Want to list off other random complaints as well?

> This is an odd criticism as he was the CEO of PayPal.

He was an awful CEO of X (which is why he was forced out as CEO twice, and was never CEO of PayPal), too, which may be more to the point, and the successful product X named itself for after forcing himself out the second time was acquired (and was the occasion of his brief return) after Musk’s visions had failed.

> Why would it be important if he was an awful coder or not?

It probably wouldn’t, if he didn’t spend his time as CEO trying to do some other job instead. It’s not always bad if your CEO is doing some other role as well as being CEO, but its a doubly bad thing if they are doing some other role and they are a poor choice for the other job.

lol, where did you learn your Elon Musk history?

He started X.com which was an online payments company. Later, X.com and Confinity Inc, would merge and rename themselves Paypal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X.com

Except even that also implies that Elon had some say in PayPal, when in reality, Confinity had already developed what would become PayPal, including filing trademarks and such, at the merger.

Musk's tenure in the newly merged company consisted of complaining incessently that he didn't like/know Solaris and Java so the working POC/prototype should be thrown away and rebuilt in Windows/ASP, for four months until the board had enough and terminated him as CEO.

>he didn't like/know Solaris and Java so the working POC/prototype should be thrown away and rebuilt in Windows/ASP, for four months until the board had enough and terminated him as CEO.

Goddamn the man hasn't changed one iota in twenty years.

I'd love to hear what people who talk about these family connections actually think they were and where they got this idea from.

I've heard it claimed hundreds of times but with no clear idea what these connections were, how they came about or what they were used for. Or even any evidence whatsoever that they existed...

Because he said it himself? Why else would anyone come up with such specific source of income? Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20140413112637/https://www.askme...

His dad invested $200k at 10% at a later stage. I'm pretty sure it qualifies as rich daddy. Source: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1211064937004589056

Btw Musk had little to do with the success of X. The revenue of PayPal was merely $61 million at the time Musk was fired as CEO of X.com(later PayPal).

There's an unimaginable gulf between buying books paying tuition to college (especially back when that was affordable), and an investment in a business that's the equivalent of about $350k today.

Elon was never going to have to eat rice and beans, or go work in a cubicle for a big corp to pay the bills if any of his ventures failed.

> His dad invested $200k at 10% at a later stage

You're reading that wrong. Elon is claiming his dad invested 10% OF a $200k round of seed funding. The actual amount was $28k. (See wiki: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zip2 )

I was being more charitable to Elon by trusting what he said himself. I know the $28k number. Almost 40% of the households with college age kids earn less than 70k before taxes. How many would be able to afford to give a $28k loan to their kids?

Source - https://www.statista.com/statistics/782411/parental-income-o...

You weren't being charitable to Elon, you just either misread what was in the tweet or mistyped and claimed his dad invested $200k.

Median household income is $70k, so I'd expect you'd need to be upper middle class or quite good with money to loan $28k to your kids. I certainly won't argue that the Musks were poor, but there's a very big difference between "able to help their kids through college and loan $28k" and "silver spoon trust fund kids".

> I'm not sure where this rubbish conspiracy came from

Umm... his father.

https://futurism.com/elon-musk-dad-emerald-mine

And Elon himself:

https://twitter.com/parismarx/status/1611861409733967872?lan...

> This is going to sound slightly crazy, but my father had a share in an Emerald mine in Zambia.

The call is coming from inside the house, Elmo.

Shhhh you're supposed to ignore all the things Elon has said in the past that directly contradict things he says now.

Simply prove it and get $93,000 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35920193

What’s hilarious is that okay, even if his dad made it up…

Elon has -also- said that he and his family would stuff their pockets with money and stones that wouldn’t fit in the safe from overflowing.

What next? “I only said I did it, but I never actually saw myself doing it?”

At some point there is a recognition that (at least) one of two things is accurate: 1) that a mine exists, or 2) that Elon is a serial liar.

Also, “get a million dogecoin”… is that before or after he hires a PI to go into your background for a little light character assassination for making him look foolish?

> Elon’s big start came from the success of X and Paypal

To which Elon contributed, AFAICT, money (both directly and in his ability to scare up capital), not management.

He was forced out as CEO of X when they had no product success, X bought the company that owned PayPal and briefly brought him back as CEO then forced him out against six months later, after which X renamed itself after its one successful product, which it had acquired.

The funny thing about it is that, even if the emerald mine had been real, it would explain maybe 1/10000 of Musk's wealth. If those who talk about the "emerald mine" had managed to multiply the wealth of their family by 10000 they would consider it an incredible success.

It's a lot easier to gamble with your future when failure means a comfortable life of freedom, than when it means poverty and destitution.

It's also significantly easier to turn $100k into infinite money in the dot com boom

Time value of money is a thing, you know?

Back in those days, emerald mines were literally the equivalent of present-day tech IPO money. And if you read his biography by Ashlee Vance, you'll find out how the family would take vacations and travel to places by private plane.

> if there was Emerald Mine money there wasn't much of it.

You don't go to an American University as anything but a very rich African, or as a sponsorship. Source: I am a born African. I sure hope it was emerald money, else his father has some explaining to do to SARS.

University was much cheaper back then and he apparently got a student loan somehow.

Elon received a lot of money from his Father during his college years, and the very reason why he was in college in America is that he was bankrolled by a South African entrepreneur. Without this father he would be nowhere close to where he is.

Can’t you say the same about anyone who grows up upper middle class or above in the US? Paying for kids’ college is pretty standard. Many middle class families do it too.

There’s plenty to criticize Elon about, but this one’s a bit of a reach.

Note to readers: the claimed amount he received from his father is $115k split between him and his brother.

And even if he had been fabulously wealthy since childhood, it still wouldn't discredit his accomplishments. There's how many tens of thousands of mega-rich kids right now who won't do a single thing of note with their lives?

It does not matter if Musk had an emerald mine or not. For sure he turned a diamond mine (Twitter) to a shit pool. Do you trust him to be the CEO of your company? Ask yourself. I personally want a level headed guy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com