When people start using abstract measures to describe something easily quantifiable, it's usually because they're dissembling.

We have a pretty good idea what Errol's net worth is, and it's a couple million bucks.

The emerald mine in question was purchased for the equivalent of $40,000.

In today's money it's the equivalent of about $150,000, and funded by selling a plane that sold for twice that amount. I would classify having enough disposable income to own a $300,000 plane & a net worth of a few million to be wealthy.

I should note that my working definition of "wealthy" doesn't mean they never have to work again, or don't have to work to maintain their desired lifestyle. Other people may have different benchmarks. As you said, abstract measures aren't easily quantified, and someone else's benchmark for wealthy may be higher.

This is some motivated accounting right here. You have no idea what debt financed either of those assets.

> I would classify a net worth of a few million to be wealthy.

This describes many boomers that simply own a house.

>This describes most boomers and older GenXs.

It most assuredly does not.

The median net worth of the Baby Boomer generation in America is $1.2 million.

Median net worth of boomers is $200k, average net worth is $1.2m because there are a lot of very rich boomers.

https://www.businessinsider.com/typical-baby-boomer-net-wort...

> Median net worth of boomers is $200k, average net worth is $1.2m

That's not mathematically logical. 'Average' can be used to describe mean, median or mode.

While average is more informal, it is the same as the mean, mathematically speaking. Some people may use it, well, informally, to represent other concepts, but the mathematical definition is quite clear.

Right. And the point here is that the original comment implied that most people in that age bracket had a net worth of $1.2 million.

So median is the relevant interpretation of average in that context. Your correction and interpretation are valid.

You’re right, I edited the comment shortly after posting it. Most boomers don’t have 3M in housing. But many do and owning a house on the coast is not considered remarkable.

Imagine arguing that somebody didn’t have financial backing because his dad sold plane and bought emerald mine for half of profit (in country then known for black worker exploitation) for $40.000, and is worth couple millions at best.

This is how every discussion on Errol Musk's wealth goes.

Someone makes an implication that they were fabulously wealthy, using abstract measures like emerald mines, or small planes as a substitute for a concrete measure of wealth.

Someone points out the value of both those things was actually quite low.

Then the goal posts shift to how much more money the Musk family had than the average family, which is true enough.

But they were still decidedly middle class. They all had to work for a living. And in American terms, there are tens of millions of households with similar wealth. Upper middle class, to be sure, but nothing unusual.

And the emerald mine, such as it was, is said to have been in Zambia, not South Africa.

> Then the goal posts shift to how much more money the Musk family had than the average family, which is true enough.

There's hardly a move of goalpost here. People merely argue that showing Elon as self-made "in parent's garage" is bullshit. He had family with capabilities to enable him to participate in ecoms bubble.

> Zambia, not South Africa

"You are wrong, that labour camp wasn't in USSR but in North Korea." I've haven't named the country BTW.

As someone pointed out in another comment, "wealthy" does not mean "never having to work again". My life growing up would have been dramatically different if my parents had been worth even a low amount of millions, and the opportunities available to me would have been drastically higher.

A million dollars in 1970-1980 is worth around 3 to 7 million dollars now. 3 millions in that period is worth at least 10 millions right now. And there is decidedly not tens of millions of households in the US with that networth, let alone a single person.

To be clear, his net worth is a couple million dollars today.

Couple million is still leagues above middle class

When we're discussing total net worth, a couple million dollars is decidedly middle class.

In the US, there are 13.6 million households with a net worth over $1 million when excluding their primary residence, out of a total of 126 million households.

Over 10% of households in the US, even when excluding the value of their home, have over a million dollars in assets.

So 10% is middle class? Shouldn’t it be 35+?

like anyone in developing countries and especially wealthy white South Africans do fit this bill rather well would hoard their actual private wealth in other jurisdictions. just because the company itself is worth nothing on paper doesn't mean they haven't pillaged the country resources for private gain like all the other wanna-be crooks and aspiring kleptocrats. [1][2]

There is a good reason why the family left SA the moment apartheid was abolished and why Elon Musk never went back since the end of apartheid.

Every entitled chuckle-duck born with a silver spoon in their mouth likes to launder their past to make them look self-made. Elon is no different.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treasure_Islands:_Tax_Havens_a...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleptopia

Besides that, Elon didn't inherit that wealth. He moved to Canada with little money, worked blue collar jobs and had student debt. That's what he started with. At Zip2 he couldn't afford a second computer.

People WANT to believe a mythology that Elon started off rich to feel better about not accomplishing anything with their own equally or more privileged life. People that started with little themselves don't have this level of cognitive dissonance and see it more as an immigrant success story and inspiration.

He got a $28,000 loan from his father when starting Zip2.

The biggest privilege is having your family's security net, even if you don't use it. Musk has also had luck, being in the right time and place for the dot-com boom. Unlike a lot of people who grew up privileged, he's been a hustler with great business instincts. Unlike a lot of hustlers with great business instincts, he grew up privileged.

False, it was not when starting Zip2, it was a later funding round and the funding didn't depend on Errol's investment

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1211064937004589056

I looked for a source other than a tweet from Musk, who like many entrepreneurs is known to stretch the truth. Couldn’t find a definitive source, but it’s mentioned going as far back as the 90s according to Google, with not enough detail to say the exact timing but suggesting that it was crucial at the time. Of course, that’s also a hallmark of startup stories.

The loan came later and he was no more privileged than the average Canadian or American at the time. People who dismiss it as privilege are projecting envy, full stop.

And what are people who feel the need to defend the world’s richest person projecting?

Could the average American in 1995 give a $28,000 loan to his kid? Median net worth was ~$100,000 in today’s dollars. If ‘privilege’ has negative connotations for you, use ‘luck’ instead. I don’t think there’s any question that Musk made some of his own luck through hard work and intelligence, but we often observe the rich with survivorship bias because it would upset the social order if we stopped believing that hard work and intelligence are enough to become rich.

> When he started Zip2 he couldn't afford a second computer

What does this sentence mean, why’d he need a second computer? Parsing out the odd wording that means he could afford a computer

What’s with the second computer? It’s proper nerd sniped me this haha

One computer for development, one for a server. He couldn't afford a second so had to use his primary for both purposes.

Actually in fairness that does make sense given a bit of thought

It's well documented that Elon was quite poor as a student in Canada/US.

He left South Africa at 17 with no money to speak of. He's estranged from his father for reasons no one talks about, which makes the father's possible wealth irrelevant.

And yet this "apartheid emerald mine fortune" is such a good story that it will keep being "internet true" forever.

Wikipedia is great for many things, but I would steer clear of it for biographical information of prominent contemporary persons. It's very political and the amount of on-the-fly stealth editing that goes on the site should discredit it. Great for technical information or basic history. Avoid it like the plague anywhere it seeks to weigh in on "the current thing".

When you have to attack Wikipedia as being generically unreliable, instead of presenting some reliable facts and citations about the discussion topic that actually prove your point, you don't have a point.

It has been a long-standing complaint for awhile. In partricular, there appears to be a core group of editors that have displayed a blatant bias against Israel. Huge ommissions of information that only inflame anti-semitic passions and hinder real dialogue from occuring. There are other issues, but this one shows the limitations of wikipedia and how a narrow mindset can comandeer a few pages. Again, I like wikipedia, but it's only reliable for mundane issues.

https://aish.com/48964486/

https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/wikipedias-jewish-problem-pe...

Also, personal campaigns being carried out to smear people. Not a good look for a neutral non-partisan outfit. That's why I ignore bios about anyone as a rule on wiki.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/former-wikipedia-edi...

Left bias is very prevalent: https://youtu.be/kiRgJYMw6YA

What facts would you believe? Elon himself tells a very different story:

https://www.amazon.com/Elon-Musk-SpaceX-Fantastic-Future/dp/...

According to others, that story is severely embellished:

https://savingjournalism.substack.com/p/i-talked-to-elon-mus...

Wikipedia is not a reliable source for every info in the world. I hope people realize that. It's funny that some people blindly trust what some unknown party has written on the net on any kind of subject.

Tertiary sources (e.g. encyclopedias) are inherently this way regardless of whether or not it is editable by nearly anyone. One of the strengths in Wikipedia is crowd sourcing and a strong editorial culture that, for example, enforces citing sources and giving unbiased takes, with mechanisms to mark problems with articles rather than deleting them. This ultimately leads to a degree of editorial transparency that is unmet by any other type of source of this kind.

> One of the strengths in Wikipedia is crowd sourcing and a strong editorial culture that, for example, enforces citing sources and giving unbiased takes,

This is a laughable statement. That's assuming the newspapers acting as sources are devoid of bias, while we clearly know that they are partisan in the own right: even stuff that the NYT is heavily biased and can't be seriously used as a reference for everything.

Crowd-sourcing is not a robust mechanism to prevent that from happening either. Just look at every controversial topic on Wikipedia, there is only one narrative that is accepted while the reality might be way more complex that what is portrayed in a paragraph.

Anyone who has tried to insert a true, but counter narrative, fact into a topical article know where the limits of your description are.

For any popular topic, there are self-appointed watchdogs who will revert edits in bad faith and argue with you on the Talk page until you give up and go away. There aren't enough admins to adjudicate all disputes, so what you're reading on a controversial topic is often the product of the most stubborn arguers.

That's how the sausage is made on WP.

We certainly don't and shouldn't blindly trust you, since all you're doing is attacking Wikipedia's reliability, instead of presenting any reliable facts or evidence or citations about the actual discussion topic himself, Elon Musk. Wikipedia is a hell of a lot more reliable than some random guy on the internet who doesn't have a point or any evidence, and has to resort to generically attacking Wikipedia instead.

Attacking the very idea that it's even possible to know the truth is what you do when the truth isn't on your side.

Well right now the highest value note in south Africa is worth about $13.

I'm sure many HN regulars have homes costing much more than a safe full of $13 notes.

I wouldn't be too confident that "We had so much money at times we couldn't even close our safe." is an amount of money that would actually make someone particularly wealthy by American standards without doing a fair bit of research on what currency that safe would have been full of and how much it had been worth at the time.

At the time the South African Rand was kept somewhat pegged to the US Dollar, and has an average value of R2/$.

Why would anything right now be relevant to Elon growing up 40 years ago?

> and how much it had been worth at the time

Why assume that the safe was full of South African currency?

> a fair bit of research on what currency that safe would have been full of

There are too many unknowns: the currency, the denominations, the size of the safe. There is little point in speculating whether it was (or was not) a life-changing sum.