Zip2 would've been a complete bust in 2003, and he wouldn't have had the funds to move on to his subsequent ventures. The guy obviously has a lot of great ides, but lots of people have great ideas. Without the financial backing... good luck.
I think that acknowledges that luck is also a prerequisite.
Of a hundred million babies born this year, they do NOT all have the same chance of becoming a billionaire. That's luck.
Self made billionaires are opportunists. They are smart. They are shrewd. They look at the big picture. For every reason they're told they can't do something, they find a solution, they don't see obstacles as deal breakers, they're just speed bumps, irritations that need to be resolved/removed, hoops to be jumped through to get where they're going. They look for the next possibility and insert themselves where they need to in order to leverage what they have to get where they need to go.
So you see it doesn't have as much to do with chance as you might think. What was chance was the bubble occurring. But Elon making use of that opportunity when it presented itself was anything but chance, that was all Elon. He spied an opportunity and rode it until he was shrewd enough to get off the elevator... which is what he's still doing. Finding opportunity and leveraging it to make his next billion dollars.
This is an especially disingenuous characterization, considering he jumped through the hoops to immigrate to the US and go to California, which means he observed and realized that CA is where he should be and worked towards getting there (he's been very vocal about him coming to North America being one of the most important decisions he made and that he quite planned for it). He didn't happen to wake up one day in CA.
Yes, many people are luckier and they happen to be born in Silicon Valley to affluent parents, but the fact that most (almost all) of them have not achieved what Elon has achieved hints at a the use of a stretched definition of the word "luck."
Forgive me if that seems a bit snarky but her point is not "you want it" but "deeply thinking about the problem." And when you do that, and you discover that the solution you have to a problem seems to be wildly over valued with respect to your understanding of it, you sell out because you know that when the market stops being irrational that value will evaporate.
You could do like Pincus, found a gaming company and make sure you can pull out $200M on your own before the rest of the world catches up. Or Mason w/ Groupon. There is a lot more work than lottery in there.
you can say this about a lot of people... pg even, but paypal went public in 2002. i would argue he did the opposite, elon musk remarkably sold a company in the wake of the dot com crash.
but it's like they say, once you're lucky, twice you're good. And Elon Musk is damn good.