Adding a large inheritance to your hand skews the odds somewhat...

Also, odds are not all of destiny. Some crappy things keep winning despite those odds.

>a large inheritance

"A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth puts on its shoes."

This lie is very trendy, but YSK that Elon Musk did not receive a large inheritance.

Until the age of 16 he was raised middle class supported by an Engineer salary, and then years later his father invested (ie not an "inheritance") $28k out of a $200k Zip2 round.

If that size of 'large inheritance' really made such an enormous difference, then 50% of HN would be billionaires by now!

Clearly there must be more going on in Elon's case.

Thanks for the numbers.

While it's definitely going to skew the odds, and by a lot, the sparsity of similar successful startups in those areas before him suggests that neither SpaceX nor Telsa were the kind of things that you can build with what he had from combined inheritance and PayPal cash-out.

That said, I don't think there was much from those mines: https://www.snopes.com/news/2022/11/17/elon-musk-emerald-min...

Thanks for the link.

Yes -- randomness is a real thing in the universe. Elon reminds me of a "loose aggressive" poker player. They bet and raise and bluff a lot, and they can acquire massive chip stacks if they get lucky.

I have a theory that Musk has a quality that enables him to assemble an exceptional team of people who are capable of managing him. This means he's very capable when it comes to starting and growing companies, and those companies need him less as time goes on.

It also means that if he drops into a company and takes over it'll be with a team who can't manage him, and it'll be a bit of a slow motion train wreck.

I don't think there's enough evidence to show if I'm right yet though.

I think quite the opposite.

I’ve worked for rich and successful people. Usually on their subsequent projects. My conclusion has been that the super rich and successful often don’t understand why or how they got that way, and they struggle to replicate their success. They often don’t try a similar kind of thing subsequently either, but follow a vision quest borne of their riches.

I do think Elon set a crazy high product bar at SpaceX and Tesla and a team of people achieved it. That’s commendable. But, the stories of his bad management behavior even in those places is well documented.

He’s doing the hero thing at Twitter, and it turns out… he’s neither a principled person, nor can he lead a revenue-first transformation.

What’s the total pool of leaders? Seems a bit premature to write this off as statistically impossible without understanding the number of attempts.

Also you’re not figuring in the odds that success went to his head.

More than twice. PayPal too.

Musk got booted from PayPal, apparently for trying to do things that would screw it up. Seems a bit full-circle-ish.

You shouldn't be downvoted, Elon's history with PayPal has been written about and verified many times. He smooth-talked his way in, started acting erratically, and got kicked out, but not before securing an enormous amount of money.

It's not that hard for a good investor.

Paul Graham, the person whose tweet started this thread (and also the founder of the site you're posting on, BTW) hit the business lottery with Reddit, Airbnb, Stripe, DropBox, Coinbase, Substack, Instacart, DoorDash, and many smaller or enterprise-focused companies. He just doesn't put his name on companies he funds as "founder", even though in some cases (eg. Reddit) he actually did come up with the idea for the company.

Elon Musk has a habit of finding a good business idea, investing in people who are already working on it, and then taking over the company from them.