The first company, Zip2, was started with $28k of his dad's money.

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?

The $28 was a small portion of a second round of funding (and was a loan). Not really a make or break amount.

> 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).

Musk's father invested 20-30k in Zip2 out of a 200k angel investment. That doesn't seem like a huge deal to me. For context, Musk dropped out of a grad program at Stanford to pursue Zip2. How many Stanford graduate students could raise 30k from their parents for a business venture?

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 apparent existence of the emerald mine does put some shade on musk's purely "self-made" story. Even though, in reality, no one is truly, completely self made. But Musk has fully denied the existence of an emerald mine. But now his father confirmed it. So I don't think we can trust Musk's account here and I'm not sure we can trust his father's. So I think it remains to be seen how much family money supported Elon while he became "self-made".

The evidence we have is his father claiming to have helped his sons out to the tune of $115k and said father becoming essentially bankrupt in the 90s.

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).

Where does Musk claim to be purely self-made?

I don't get why people argue like this. It's so obviously disingenuous. Owning a share of an emerald mine makes your means your family is somewhat rich maybe not filthy rich but rich enough to own a share of an emerald mine, which trust me, isn't cheap.

You have no idea how large a share it is or how large a mine it is. You simply discredit yourself and your arguments by assuming things without evidence. The description of the mine I'm aware of comes from Erol Musk where he says he traded a used plane that he had bought for 50k for 120k plus a share of a mine. Musk describes the mine as "a deposit in the middle of nowhere rather than a modern mine" [1].

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...

About 60% of households in the U.S. are living paycheck to paycheck according to Google. Most families don't have an extra 50K just lying around to invest in a mine If your family does ave that, I'm guessing you're. well off. Maybe not filthy rich, but well off.

Mining companies are on stock exchanges, you can buy shares in them and their mines for dollars each, or even cents each, depending on the company.

> I don't get why people argue like this. It's so obviously disingenuous. Owning a share of an emerald mine doesn't make your family super rich and it's obviously, demonstrably, not where Musk's wealth comes from.

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.

Errol claims they sold two emeralds randomly for ~$1000, which was then listed for a 10x markup, certainly a far cry from the "low quality emeralds" Elon stated. So we already see three things here: access to your investment's goods, a nonchalance about emerald access, and Elon attempting to downplay.

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.

You've already established your brazen disregard for the truth and ideological motivations - you don't need to keep demonstrating them.

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?