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Jeff Bezos also got a loan from his parents. Having parents with disposable capital in the >$50k range is definitely not something the majority of American fami

• TangoTrotFox 8y ago
  "When he was 17, Musk left college and moved to his mother’s home country, Canada, later obtaining passports for his mother, brother and sister to join him there. His father did not wish him well, Musk recalls. “He said rather contentiously that I’d be back in three months, that I’m never going to make it, that I’m never going to make anything of myself. He called me an idiot all the time. That’s the tip of the iceberg, by the way.” After Musk became successful, his father even took credit for helping him – to such a degree that it’s listed as fact in Elon’s Wikipedia entry. “One thing he claims is he gave us a whole bunch of money to start, my brother and I, to start up our first company [Zip2, which provided online city guides to newspapers]. This is not true,” Musk says. “He was irrelevant. He paid nothing for college. My brother and I paid for college through scholarships, loans and working two jobs simultaneously. The funding we raised for our first company came from a small group of random angel investors in Silicon Valley.”" https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/elon-musk-the-architect-of-tomorrow-120850/ https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/elon-m...
• spunker540 8y ago
  To be fair, with Jeff Bezos and his parents it wasn't a loan but purchased equity that is now worth billions.
• fipple 8y ago
  Most families don’t have $50k to invest in their kids’ business, but there are at least 10 million such families for each Gates/Zuckerberg/Bezos etc.