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Comment by afavour | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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,’.

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...

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...

"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"

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

this is extremely common for young adults

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