Elon disputes this.
TL;DR: In the 80s, Elon’s father sold a plane for $80k, half in cash, and the rest for 50% of a Zambian emerald mine. He had it for six years and made some good money off it, but probably not a ludicrous amount. One can imagine there being exploitative working conditions in that mine, given the time and place, but I don’t have any real knowledge on the matter.
https://savingjournalism.substack.com/p/i-talked-to-elon-mus...
This is what I could find with a quick search regarding what Elon himself claims. I had a skim and it doesn’t seem to necessarily contradict the article I linked or my summary (perhaps depending on your definition of ”good money”). There probably was an emerald mine, and yeah it probably didn’t yield enough for Musk’s father to have the family set for life or anything like that.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1375212880790913025
and more detailed article: https://savingjournalism.substack.com/p/i-talked-to-elon-mus...
I'm talking about billionaires, and what I contend is most billionaires had parents or family members who were rich which helped them.
- Elon Musk's parents owned an emerald mine in S. Africa
- Bill Gates not only got seed money from his millionaire parents but one of his parents was on the board of IBM and helped him land early Microsoft deals
- Bezos got 300k seed money from his parents
- Zuckerberg, is maybe an exception? His parents were only upper middle class. Enough money for good schools and private CS tutors. Seems plausible that if he was lower middle class he wouldn't have made it to Harvard.