And what good was his family wealth for? How much of it actually played a role and how? Did he get millions from his family to start PayPal?

I hear a lot about the role of "family wealth", but I never actually hear about mechanism, how exactly it helps. If you're a legacy of a wealthy family, and thanks to that, get into Harvard, then sure, that's a real leg up, but it doesn't explain why some Harvard graduates become billionaires, while overwhelming majority do not. Similarly, if your family is rich enough to invest $1M in your startup, that's surely a huge advantage over regular people, but given how easy it is for non-scions to get $1M in investment funding (and it's really easy), I can scarcely believe that "family wealth" is really such a huge causal factor.

This just sounds to me like you haven’t read enough. It’s not that hard to understand honestly. Here are some randomly picked links:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/qj8q8m/admit-your-financial-...

https://gen.medium.com/families-like-mine-rarely-realize-the...

https://spsp.org/news-center/character-context-blog/how-and-...

I clicked on the first link. Is the point here that Elon Musk is a billionaire because parents bought him a new car when he was in his twenties? If this is the example of how family wealth allows people to get ahead in life, then, well, allow me to continue to disregard it. What kind car you drive has pretty much zero impact when it comes to achieving wealth or success.

> You can’t seriously claim that he was broke while being part of an emerald mining family?

Unless he was completely estranged from his father for almost his entire adult life, which seems to be the case.