>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.