Funny you mention this as why he was self-made, where by all accounts he was considered an awful coder in this Paypal position, and was only able to be in the country (illegally) at the time, or secure this job, was because of his family's money and connections.
"...Peter took some time off. The guy who ran X.com became the CEO, and I remained the CTO. He was really into Windows, and I was really into Unix. So there was this bad blood for a while between the engineering teams. He was convinced that Windows was where it’s at and that we have to switch to Windows, but the platform that we used was, I thought, built really well and I wanted to keep it. I wanted to stay on Unix..."
"...I had this intern that I hired before the merger, and we thought, “We built all these cool Unix projects, but it’s kind of pointless now because they are going to scrap the platform. We might as well do something else.” So he and I decided we were going to find ourselves fun projects. We did one kind of mean project where we built a load tester package that would beat up on the Windows prototype (the next version was going to be in Windows). We built a load tester that would test against the Unix platform and the new Windows one and show in beautiful graphs that the Windows version had 1 percent of the scalability of the Unix one. “Do you really want to do that?”...
...It was me acting out, but it was kind of a low time for me because I was not happy with the way we were going..."
"...At the time, already I had hated the guy’s guts for forcing me to do Windows, and then, in the end, I was like, “You gotta go, man.” My whole argument to him was, “We can’t switch to Windows now. This fraud thing is most important to the company. You can’t allow any additional changes. It’s one of these things where you want to change one big thing at a time, and the fraud is a pretty big thing. So introducing a new platform or doing anything major—you just don’t want to do it right now.” That was sort of the trigger for a fairly substantial conflict that resulted in him leaving and Peter coming back and me taking over fraud...."
Because Musk's push came from no objective reason beyond he "didn't know it". The Board said "you're the CEO, you don't need to know all the technologies".
This is an odd criticism as he was the CEO of PayPal. Why would it be important if he was an awful coder or not?
I’m not a proponent of Musk but this seems like odd shade to throw on him.
So, technically he was never the CEO of "PayPal", just the company that became PayPal, and he got himself fired by the boards of both the companies that turned into PayPal. He retained 11% ownership of PayPal and ended up making a decent amount of money from the EBay acquisition.
I sure I wish I was that incompetent.
It is objectively true that he was ceo of x.com and PayPal, but neither of those positions require coding skills.
I’m not defending Musk as a CEO or human or anything. I’m just curious why it matters to bring up people thought his coding sucked. Was he a good chef? Was he terrible at Mario Kart? Want to list off other random complaints as well?
He was an awful CEO of X (which is why he was forced out as CEO twice, and was never CEO of PayPal), too, which may be more to the point, and the successful product X named itself for after forcing himself out the second time was acquired (and was the occasion of his brief return) after Musk’s visions had failed.
> Why would it be important if he was an awful coder or not?
It probably wouldn’t, if he didn’t spend his time as CEO trying to do some other job instead. It’s not always bad if your CEO is doing some other role as well as being CEO, but its a doubly bad thing if they are doing some other role and they are a poor choice for the other job.
He started X.com which was an online payments company. Later, X.com and Confinity Inc, would merge and rename themselves Paypal.
Musk's tenure in the newly merged company consisted of complaining incessently that he didn't like/know Solaris and Java so the working POC/prototype should be thrown away and rebuilt in Windows/ASP, for four months until the board had enough and terminated him as CEO.
Goddamn the man hasn't changed one iota in twenty years.
I've heard it claimed hundreds of times but with no clear idea what these connections were, how they came about or what they were used for. Or even any evidence whatsoever that they existed...
The reality is that he is from a wealthy, well-connected, post-apartheid white family. They funded his coming to Canada, the US, University, and getting first business off the ground. The reality is that he has had a silver spoon his entire life.
I don't want read between the lines, but it's hard not to think it's a way for people to feel better about their own accomplishments by saying someone else had a massive head start.
Whether others do or don't, we should all be trying our best, be grateful for what we have, and proud of where we came from.
The money did come from something unethical--his family was enriched by segregation; racism; apartheid. That emerald money is dirty and is likely a key reason why Elon would deny its existence.
This brings us to the second thing: Elon lying about this. He has demonstrated that he is willing to lie about something this significant, which should do real damage to his credibility and trustworthiness if we are being logical and objective. What else is he willing to lie about?
And Elon was misleading and disingenuous but could still make a case that he hasn't explicitly lied on these things.
Ahhh, those historic pillars of morals and ethics, sub-Saharan Africa precious stone mines...
This. Parents have worked their tails off to build a better life for their kids for millenia. Calling it a form of privilege seems like a gross misunderstanding of human behavior.
Do you sense the pattern? It would be as if Paris Hilton went around repeatedly saying she was dirt poor and used her galaxy sized brain to start her own business without any help. People would, obviously and quite reasonably, mock it for its absurdity. Yet when the same happens to Elon Musk, there are endless hysterical defenses ready. As if you are telling a child that Santa isn't real.
University is far more expensive today than back then, too. Ironically this supports your point in Elon’s case, but today it’s very much not a given that parents can even minimally help their kids get through college. My wife’s couldn’t.
Median American household income is $70k before taxes. Do you think this household can afford college tuition and expenses?
It’s fair to say Elon’s family wasn’t poor. But the level of support he got wasn’t any more than the typical journalist who is criticizing him.
Also it's insane to compare Elon's family with a Journalist. Elon's father invested $200k for 10% in his first venture while half the journalist earn less than 50k. https://www.bls.gov/ooh/media-and-communication/reporters-co...
Journalism at the national level is extremely competitive, and draws from a highly credentialed talent pool. The reason people with such credentials pursue such a low paying job is because their families are often quite affluent—they are often doctors, lawyers, etc.
Having your father pay for Wharton Business School isn't the same thing as having your father pay for the College of New Jersey.
Ordinary people make about 35k per year, half make less. They're not paying for an expensive college education.
There is no evidence his family was wealthy by American standards. Errol has claimed in the interview with the Sun to have helped his sons at uni to the tune of $115k and gave them a $28k loan (as part of a $200k round of seed funding) for their first business. The only sources on the emerald mine are the Musks, where the claim is they acquired a share of an informal mine by trading in a small plane they owned (likely a $70k Cessna). Errol Musk went bust in the 90s and there's no evidence of any other family wealth flowing to Elon.
There is no evidence they had any useful connections to speak of and no evidence any family gave more than a fraction of his uni (half of $115k) and business ($28k) funding.
People endlessly repeat random rumors they've heard which grow in the telling. People should go read the original sources wherever possible, such as the Sun article: https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/22104496/elon-musks-dad-errol-...
> Errol went as far as to say that emerald money paid for his son's move to the US, where Elon would go on to attend the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton Business School on scholarship — with, apparently, emerald-generated cash in his pocket for living expenses.
https://futurism.com/elon-musk-dad-emerald-mine
> when he badly needed money at the beginning of Tesla and SpaceX there was certainly no secret backup of "Emerald Mine" money
That's not personal wealth, that's company investment. Just because you (or your family) doesn't have spare money kicking around to finance a space rocket company doesn't mean that you're not rich.
Someone with an ownership stake in a mine that produces material with a variety of industrial and commercial uses is not necessarily rich. But that person is in a relatively tiny group compared to the group containing all parents who are able to contribute to their children's educational expenses. And the "owns <part of> a mine" group's average net worth is probably a fair bit higher than that of the "can contribute to the kid's college" group.
Hence, if you own an emerald mine, you might be rich.
I don't think anyone is suggesting elon musk rose from being a homeless person to a billionaire. I guess this internet dispute is whether he made his own money, or inherieted it (e.g. like trump). Whether or not his parents owned an emerald mine doesn't really shed much light on that debate. Its entirely possible they were moderately wealthy but the emerald mine wasn't super lucrative and musk still made money mostly by means of his own combination of skill and luck.
"I will pay a million Dogecoin for proof of this mine’s existence!" - https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1646272562488569857
"You're trying to tell me Musk's family is rich? He couldn't even pay for SpaceX himself, how could he be rich?!"
"I've put away some cash for my child to go to college, are you saying I'm as rich as Elon Musk?!"
It's all just so ridiculous. A lot of people here seem convinced that there are only two arguments to be made: that Musk is a spoiled trust fund baby that deserves no credit for everything, or that Musk was a hard-scrabble self-starter that did everything on his own. Maybe, just maybe the truth is somewhere in the middle?
Full disclosure - my parents paid for a lot of my college expenses. At least half of the people who go to Ivy leagues have parents that will pay for their college expenses. It’s almost entirely, if not completely irrelevant to his work at PayPal, the founding of SpaceX, and the building of Tesla.
So it’s baffling (to me, at least) that it keeps getting brought up as a reason to hate Elon Musk. It feels that people want to find reasons to deeply hate this person, and they through anything they possibly can against him, nonsensical or not.
But at no point was I making that argument. The OP suggested (as Musk has many times) that the mine literally didn't exist. I was simply pointing out that according to his father it very much did exist and paid for Elon's college.
@deelowe points out that they (like many people) are saving to fund their child's living expenses in college (and probably tuition as well). Therefore, you're either suggesting that @deelowe has family wealth or you're arguing in bad faith.
The post I replied to said:
> I'm not sure where this rubbish conspiracy came from but if there was Emerald Mine money there wasn't much of it.
My reply clarified that there was indeed an emerald mine (according to Musk's father) and that it paid for his college living expenses. I then went on to say that an inability to pay for SpaceX does not mean you are "not rich".
> you're either suggesting that @deelowe has family wealth or you're arguing in bad faith.
But that's silly too. With no numbers attached "family wealth" doesn't mean anything. Almost all families have "family wealth", if anything the bad faith argument here is trying to suggest that all wealth is somehow equal.
You'll note in my original reply I didn't even say that Elon's family was inordinately wealthy, just that the mine was real and that it paid for his college. Any "bad faith" on top of that is your own interpretation, not my words.
And yet so fascinating, and ubiquitous.
Human consciousness is a hell of a drug.
529s are a fucking scam.
I agree that not all 529s are good, only 2 plans received a gold rating from Morningstar in 2022: Utah & Michigan. I wouldn't choose anything other than those.
Perhaps the scam is when banks let people choose their own investments rather than have it be fully managed.
And so the account ended up continually ending up in the hands of even seedier banksters....
I didnt discover this until after my grandmother passed, and I was able to trace it back through various funds - and they just raped the account...
So if you call your advisor, and say "i want my 529 to only focus on X" they tell you that you have no control over the index and the plan will be the most conservative 50-year-old actuary data which has no fucking clue where the market is heading and then berate you for when their 529 index loses value...
I was ready to pay that investment banker's family a personal visit with skills that I have accumulated over a number of decades.
Musk's wealth is well documented. It comes from founding and selling a series of companies - not an emerald mine. Repeating the emerald mine meme is just a way to declare yourself a dishonest participant in the conversation - or perhaps you genuinely think you can fool people with obvious lies?
If he hadn't been given that, he might not have been in a position to sell Zip2 for a massive profit during the dotcom boom. That sale is what made Elon personally very wealthy.
Where did the $28k come from? How much money did Elon's dad provide for his living expenses, international moves, etc while going through college and the Zip2 startup? Where did that money come from?
> How much money did Elon's dad provide for his living expenses, international moves, etc while going through college and the Zip2 startup?
The Sun Errol interview answers that. About half of $115k (as he had to split it with his brother).
As for where the money came from, I believe Musk's father owned an engineering business. Or maybe it was profits from a share in an emerald mine - what does that matter though?
The Emerald mine denial was shady and dishonest, Elon probably thinking he can get away with it as "technically correct" because there was no actual mine that anyone can point to, just paying locals for any emeralds they have found lying around.
Elon seems about as self made as you can get in the USA, with the approximate amount of support you'd expect from an upper middle class family (helping pay for college and a small $28k business loan).
So, he has an unknown share of a mine of dubious value. "Trust me, that isn't cheap." I think you've done a very good job of explaining why people shouldn't trust you, because, unbothered by a lack of knowledge you are happy to leap to conclusions.
1 - https://www.the-sun.com/news/8014711/elon-musk-dad-errol-cha...
Interestingly, the intelligence level of the observer very often seems to have no effect. It's a very interesting phenomenon, I simply can't understand why humanity essentially ignores it.
According to Federal Reserve, only ~15% of American families directly hold any stock. We're not even talking about direct investments to a private company here and the % is already low. There seems to be an inability to determine direct relationship from Errol to mine owner (to justify a very low investment at an early stage), so using logic, Errol passed some figure needed to gain any access. Likely not as high as people assume, but also not the nothing you've been attempting to brand it as in this thread.
The reason I'm calling out your lack of integrity is because you're attempting to shift discussion away from Elon's inability to be honest as the focus is on his upbringing, and instead trying to make this about his current forms of wealth. The latter of which, is not what people are discussing. Certainly you understand how peculiar this is correct? Defending someone by shifting focus to another topic and calling those you disagree with disingenuous while you do the same is a very good indication this is no longer rational for you, it's purely emotional.
That someone might've marked up a couple emeralds Musk may have sold once (I believe the story is disputed) doesn't prove the quality of emeralds at the mine. Your point about Americans holding any stock is equally bizarre. "Directly" does a lot of work there, indirectly, it's closer to two thirds of American adults, so I'm not even sure what point you think you're making. Nobody, including Elon, disputes that his parents were relatively wealthy, so even if the 15% figure you're citing weren't misleading it would be irrelevant.
Your general pattern of argument here is to tell obvious lies and then, when confronted, to spin off on pointless digressions. Musk came from a relatively wealthy family - that was never disputed by anyone, Elon included, and it's obviously not the source of his present-day wealth. What I would like to return to is my original question of why you would do this? I mean, you understand this is totally transparent, right? I get why your politics or ideology might compel you to slander people you dislike, but why wouldn't you try to do a good job of it?
Musk’s parents helping with living expenses is actually the norm in America. Parents pay over 50% of the costs of tuition, room and board for American students: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-07-23/universit...
Here is his mother denying it: https://twitter.com/mayemusk/status/1654983542336520192
Here is Elon's story: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1654971702571331584
Here's a video of Elon back in the day on CNN talking about sleeping on the floor and buying his first expensive car with the money he was making from x.com and Justine Musk saying she fears they will become spoiled brats: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9mczdODqzo
So who to believe?
Elon has obviously managed to create incredibly successful businesses. And he is also from an upper class background, which makes things easier, but hey, doesn't mean he isn't talented and that he worked really hard to get where he is.
Another thing that also seems pretty obvious is that he wants to hide his privileged background. Here is an archived interview from Forbes where he openly talks about his father's private plane and the emerald mine:
https://web.archive.org/web/20140802011449/http://www.forbes...
I wouldn't call that lower middle class, not even upper middle.
This says that Errol claims he managed to give his two sons about $115k in total. Which makes sense given he got his Emerald mine share for less than that.
There's also literally zero evidence that Errol had any useful connections here.
It really irritates me how many myths float around because people cannot be bothered to go find the original sources...
I’d never claim to be anything other than upper middle class (even though my dad grew up in a village in Bangladesh and his elementary school had no walls). But at the same time, if I became a billionaire it would be extremely disingenuous to imply that it was the result of family wealth. This level of family wealth is mundane in top American schools. The journalists whining about Musk almost certainly had similar support from their parents.
For context, a doctor and lawyer family in a state capital will earn $2-3m per decade, which is MUCH more than any reasonable estimates of the Musk family's wealth or income.
According to Elon's dad, he was rich:
‘I drove them to school in a convertible Rolls-Royce Corniche, they had thoroughbred horses to ride and motorbikes at the age of 14. They were spoilt, I suppose. Maybe that’s why Elon is acting like a spoilt child now,’.
this is extremely common for young adults
I'm no fan of Musk, but I'm even less a fan of being intentionally misleading.
> You're correct that Musk isn't a "billionaire heir to an emerald mine"
Umm... his father.
https://twitter.com/parismarx/status/1611861409733967872?lan...
> This is going to sound slightly crazy, but my father had a share in an Emerald mine in Zambia.
The call is coming from inside the house, Elmo.
Elon has -also- said that he and his family would stuff their pockets with money and stones that wouldn’t fit in the safe from overflowing.
What next? “I only said I did it, but I never actually saw myself doing it?”
At some point there is a recognition that (at least) one of two things is accurate: 1) that a mine exists, or 2) that Elon is a serial liar.
Also, “get a million dogecoin”… is that before or after he hires a PI to go into your background for a little light character assassination for making him look foolish?
There’s plenty to criticize Elon about, but this one’s a bit of a reach.
Back in those days, emerald mines were literally the equivalent of present-day tech IPO money. And if you read his biography by Ashlee Vance, you'll find out how the family would take vacations and travel to places by private plane.
His dad invested $200k at 10% at a later stage. I'm pretty sure it qualifies as rich daddy. Source: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1211064937004589056
Btw Musk had little to do with the success of X. The revenue of PayPal was merely $61 million at the time Musk was fired as CEO of X.com(later PayPal).
Elon was never going to have to eat rice and beans, or go work in a cubicle for a big corp to pay the bills if any of his ventures failed.
You're reading that wrong. Elon is claiming his dad invested 10% OF a $200k round of seed funding. The actual amount was $28k. (See wiki: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zip2 )
Source - https://www.statista.com/statistics/782411/parental-income-o...
Median household income is $70k, so I'd expect you'd need to be upper middle class or quite good with money to loan $28k to your kids. I certainly won't argue that the Musks were poor, but there's a very big difference between "able to help their kids through college and loan $28k" and "silver spoon trust fund kids".
To which Elon contributed, AFAICT, money (both directly and in his ability to scare up capital), not management.
He was forced out as CEO of X when they had no product success, X bought the company that owned PayPal and briefly brought him back as CEO then forced him out against six months later, after which X renamed itself after its one successful product, which it had acquired.
You don't go to an American University as anything but a very rich African, or as a sponsorship. Source: I am a born African. I sure hope it was emerald money, else his father has some explaining to do to SARS.
I'm not sure where this rubbish conspiracy came from but if there was Emerald Mine money there wasn't much of it. You may not like to hear it, but Elon's big start came from the success of X and Paypal which then bankrolled the beginnings of SpaceX and Tesla, it wasn't from a rich daddy.