When I said this last year, people said
"BUT THEY ARE DEMOCRAITIZING IT"
Its good to see that I was always right, even last year. I just didn't have a dad who owned an emerald mine.
"BUT THEY ARE DEMOCRAITIZING IT"
Its good to see that I was always right, even last year. I just didn't have a dad who owned an emerald mine.
Was there ever an emerald mine? Maybe. Though nobody has been able to find a scrap of evidence for it. Literally the only "evidence" is Errol's own boasts, which is that he bought a half-share of a Zambian mine for 100k ZAR ($50k USD). Hardly the stuff generational empires are made of.
> [Errol and a Zambian busienessman] agreed on a price [for Errol's plane], and instead of taking a payment in cash, Errol was given a portion of the emeralds produced at three small mines that the entrepreneur owned in Zambia. [...]
> Errol, who never had an ownership stake in the mine, expanded his trade by importing raw emeralds and having them cut in Johannesburg. "Many people came to me with stolen parcels," he says. "On trips overseas I would sell emeralds to jewelers. It was a cloak-and-dagger thing, because none of it was legal." After producing profits of roughly $210,000, his emerald business collapsed in the 1980s when the Russians created an artificial emerald in the lab. He lost all of his emerald earnings.
$210,000 in 1986 would be about $600,000 today.
[1]:https://www.rrauction.com/auctions/lot-detail/34638440643009...
Wonder if it would be possible to somehow trace the origin of that emerald to where it came from. Anyway its probably the Musk Family office that was the winning bidder so we may never find out now.
I don't know why this guy keeps having emeralds come up in his life. This auction is hilarious given that he repeatedly denies having anything to do with Emeralds. In fact the origin of the Emerald story is Elon himself, in a Forbes article that has since been scrubbed from the internet.
The best I can find is this Snopes article that references the Forbes article [2]:https://www.snopes.com/news/2022/11/17/elon-musk-emerald-min...
Here is the quote:
JC: How do you handle fear?
EM: Company death – not succeeding with the company – causes me a lot more stress than physical danger. But I've been in physical danger before. The funny thing is I've not actually been that nervous. In South Africa, my father had a private plane we'd fly in incredibly dangerous weather and barely make it back. This is going to sound slightly crazy, but my father also had a share in an Emerald mine in Zambia. I was 15 and really wanted to go with him but didn't realize how dangerous it was. I couldn't find my passport so I ended up grabbing my brother's – which turned out to be six months overdue! So we had this planeload of contraband and an overdue passport from another person. There were AK-47s all over the place and I'm thinking, "Man, this could really go bad."
Meanwhile, there's still no trace of this supposed mine. You'd think with all of the obsession people have with this mythical origin story, someone would have found it by now.