If you believe this, you'll believe anything. This site is a dumpster-fire of billionaire simping rubes. An absolute Dunning-Kruger hall of mirrors.

There are lots of people from wealthy backgrounds who'll slum it for a while. There's not usually a reason to doubt that. The thing to keep in mind is that voluntary/temporary poverty is very different from poverty you can't get out of with an embarrassing phone call.

I lived in relative poverty for a while when doing my first business, and while my parents were not particularly wealthy, knowing they provided an escape hatch took a lot of pressure off (living somewhere with a highly functional welfare system provided additional comfort). Things could have crashed and burned at any time, and I'd likely have been better off financially.

Doesn’t he come from a South-African diamond family or something?

If Wikipedia or Snopes are to be believed on the matter (and I really don’t know anymore), this is way overblown. Mines (emerald, not diamond btw) are cheaper than you think. If my dad buys half of a tiny mine in his retirement I’ll start walking around claiming I’m from a mine owning family!

The story of how he even got to own the mine sounds pretty wild:

“According to the story, in the mid-1980s, Errol and a copilot landed their plane near Lake Tanganyika in Zambia, where "a group of Italians" offered them 80,000 pounds in British currency in order to buy the plane.

Standing with the cash in his hand, Errol was made another offer he couldn't refuse: Would he like to buy half an emerald mine for half of his new riches?

"I said, 'Oh, all right'. So I became a half owner of the mine, and we got emeralds for the next six years."”

It proceeds to say he made about $400000 from the mine in total - hardly a billionaire villain level money.

https://www.snopes.com/news/2022/11/17/elon-musk-emerald-min...

I think the null hypothesis that Musk got lucky in the dotcom era is pretty reasonable, lots of people did. I don’t get all the conspiracy theories.

> It proceeds to say he made about $400000 from the mine in total - hardly a billionaire villain level money.

Just to clarify for anyone else wondering, that’s 400,000USD inflation adjusted for 2021. Converted to South African rand, it’s about 7.2 million.

To put that in context, the average home price in South Africa is about a million rand. So at most they would have been able to buy 7 properties. If they bought in an expensive area, they likely would have only been able to afford 4 or 5.

> Converted to South African rand, it’s about 7.2 million.

> To put that in context, the average home price in South Africa is about a million rand. So at most they would have been able to buy 7 properties

That’s... not how averages work.

If a house costs a million rand, and you have 7 million, then you can buy 7 of them, right? What am I missing?

If an average house costs a million rand, and you have 7 million rand, 7 properties is not the maximum you could buy.

(If the minimum price was a million rand, then 7 would be the maximum.)

Oh, I didn’t realise I wrote “at most”. You’re right, that was incorrect.

He also had substantially wealthy parents if I'm not mistaken. Same with Gates and others. This is the ultimate safety net.

It's easier to take risks when you have an out when it all goes really wrong. Doubt he'd still be cleaning manure today if he hadn't had a success...

I'm reminded of the song Common People by Pulp:

"But still you'll never get it right/'Cause when you're laying in bed at night/Watching roaches climb the wall/If you called your dad he could stop it all."

The album in general holds up well, good stuff.

This was basically Memnoch The Devil's [0] argument against the legitimacy of Jesus Christ's sacrifice - it didn't count, because he did it with full knowledge of his own immortality. Through crucifixion he suffered and died, but he never faced the existential dread that plagues humankind, and therefore giving up his own life was an inauthentic act.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memnoch_the_Devil

His family was rich he is as self made as Trump.

He comes from emerald wealth in South Africa for christ sake. Maybe he cleaned manure, but not out of dire need

Given that the mine was worth 40,000 pounds and stopped producing in 1989 it wasn't exactly a great source of wealth.

It's more that he came from such wealth that his family could acquire a nontrivial share in an emerald mine on what amounted to a whim.

> Standing with the cash in his hand, Errol was made another offer he couldn't refuse: Would he like to buy half an emerald mine for half of his new riches?

> "I said, 'Oh, all right'. So I became a half owner of the mine, and we got emeralds for the next six years."

https://www.news24.com/news24/bi-archive/how-elon-musks-fami...

Anybody who considers 80,000 pounds to be riches is not very wealthy.

It's 80,000 pounds dropped on a whim, not that they simply had 80k total. That is wealthy.

It's not on a whim, it's how Errol lived his entire life. Chasing "Get Rich Quick" schemes is not typically a sign of wealth.

The ability to move non trivial amounts of capital on a whim is the very definition of wealth.

> Chasing "Get Rich Quick" schemes is not typically a sign of wealth.

I've found it to be pretty common. The amount of dumb money seeking 'easy' ways to multiply flowing around silicon valley kind of defines the place.