Musk took low wage jobs when he arrived in the US.
Musk left Canada at 17, went to college in the US and sold is first business in 1999.
But I also worked at low minimum wage job at 18 at Radio Shack while living at home with my parents driving the car my parents bought me. I assure you if I have lost my job, it wouldn’t have hurt. I would just spend more time hanging out with my friends and on my $4K Mac setup.
Musk was not going to be homeless if he failed.
> Musk was not going to be homeless if he failed.
Right. He'd just get a job and rent an apartment.
I had a friend who started company after company starting in high school. Some were more successful than others, but he never lost his enthusiasm for the next company. The last time I saw him, he was living out of a trailer because he put everything he had into his next company. (Sadly, he passed a few years ago from an accident.) He left behind a large wake, and his memorial service was packed.
(He grew up in poverty.)
I think the point people are making about the low wage jobs is that it's irrelevant. People from wealthy backgrounds take low paid jobs sometimes, so having done so doesn't imply he's a rags-to-riches story.
> People from wealthy backgrounds take low paid jobs sometimes, so having done so doesn't imply he's a rags-to-riches story.
It does in Musk's case. Why not read a biography of him? It's more interesting than speculation.
Personally, I don't have any view on whether that is correct or not but it's obviously the claim that was made. It seems plausible but I'd want to see some actual data to believe it, not just anecdotes about a few of the most famous founders. Your points about low wage jobs and other trillion dollar companies are simply not relevant to it, and if biographies of Elon Musk contain information that would refute it you haven't said what or how.
Knowing you are an extremely accomplished man and fully capable of parsing this, I have to wonder why you seem blind to it.
I'm not sure if you're suggesting homeless people are homeless simply because they refuse to go out and get a job and an apartment. But as someone who's been homeless and someone who's a friend of people who've been homeless, a very large number of homeless people bust their asses at work. Things beyond their control go wrong and they have no social safety net to fall back on.
Elon Musk could've vacationed barefoot in Southeast Asia for 5 years and still returned to be given some executive job offer, just as many other children of rich kids do. Most people don't have that level of good fortune.
Except that is not what happened. He started doing menial jobs in Canada. He was never given some executive job offer.
I think I can safely say that about every single person I know from college with most being normies. No sane parent is gonna not put up their college student kid till they figure out their next step.
1. “Son, here is $5000 to cover your rent, utilities and food for one month while you look for another job in San Francisco” and keep doing that for 6 months
And
2. “We can’t afford to help you pay your rent so you are going to have to break your lease and come back home to East MiddleOfNowhere Nebraska. You might be able to get a job at “Big John’s Fish Tackle and WordPress Shop” and maintain the local church’s blog.
I knew my parents would be able to do a cheaper version of #1 s/Atlanta/SFO and s/Small town South GA/Nebraska.
I had a friend who I graduated with who was the oldest of three or four kids and whose mom was a single mother who couldn’t afford to subsidize him.
I was able to move to Atlanta and get a lower paying job as a computer operator based on an internship the year before because I knew that’s where I needed to be. My parents did subsidize me for the first year while I hustled my way to a better job through networking. I couldn’t have done that in small town South GA.
He ended up moving to a slight bigger small town on the border of GA and Alabama that paid more, lower cost of living and lower opportunities