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Some Chinese are probably wondering the same about Elon Musk.
by nocsaer1 11y ago
Some Chinese are probably wondering the same about Elon Musk.
- bane 11y agoWell, Musk had a company he sold...twice. Jia probably didn't sell the tax bureau to anybody.
- nocsaer1 11y agoReading is tech: He quickly left to start a string of his own businesses, in sectors from coal to mobile phones.
- goodJobWalrus 11y agoYeah, but that doesn't explain that much. What kind of coal / mobile phone business? Where did he get financing? If the business is buying a truckful of coal / handful of phones and going around the village selling retail, he could have gotten finances by himself. But many people do that, and never manage to become billionaires. Or he had access to some serious capital, usually not available to ordinary people. Either way, there is more to explain, how exactly do you go from the tax office to billionaire status.
- boyaka 11y agoI think the fact that he started businesses in those fields is somewhat self explanatory. What's so special about paypal, other than it was there for the rise of Internet 2.0 / ebay or whatever? Getting into coal and mobile phones before the past decade when both of these have exploded in growth is the same kind of thing.
- Jtsummers 11y agoCoal, at least, sounds like something that requires a great deal of upfront capital to establish. A business like Paypal, less so. The hard part for that is tying into payment systems, but that doesn't require a lot of upfront money, more a network effect. So the question remains, where did this initial capital come from?
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- rxin 11y agoWhile you might find it hard to believe given all the negative sentiments echoed by Western media, in China there are lots of stories like this. I also know a lot of people that have done it this way. Not necessarily multi billionaire, but definitely rags to riches.
- o0-0o 11y agoLogical fallacy alert!
- hangonhn 11y ago"Jia probably didn't sell the tax bureau to anybody." Well not in the normal sense of "sell"...