12 ms·

>if he was always like that or grew into it at one point. He went from being wealthy growing up, to being very rich after Paypal, to being an extremely rich bi

>if he was always like that or grew into it at one point. He went from being wealthy growing up, to being very rich after Paypal, to being an extremely rich billionaire, to being the most richest person in the world (maybe ever?). And now a single utterance of his can shape markets or otherwise influence millions of people. I think it would be difficult to go through the above and not come out the other end without it impacting your behaviors & world view. At a minimum, before he was this wealthy & influential he didn't have as much margin for error. A single bad decision might have tanked Tesla or SpaceX when they were getting started. It would have required Musk to be a lot more careful & deliberate. He also had to care a bit more (or at least pretend to care) about other people's thoughts/ideas etc. These days he can lose $1B in a twitter acquisition breakup fee and it barely matters. And he has enough "f*ck off" money (the amount required to tell someone to "f*ck off" with no significant consequences) to tell anyone to f*ck off. The need to adhere to social niceties is greatly reduced. This is all on top of the fact that the average person's behavior is usually going to change at least a little as they get older. All of which is to say that I think there's an excellent chance that he's grown into his current personality. If so, I think it's very possible that it's a mixture: He grew into where he is now, but the seeds were always there & his track in life has amplified or caused those seeds to take hold.

zionic 4y ago
>He went from being wealthy growing up This most definitely is false. Elon grew up middle class at best.
- bthrn 4y ago
  His dad was half owner of an emerald mine. From wikipedia: "The family was very wealthy in Elon's youth; Errol Musk once said, 'We had so much money at times we couldn't even close our safe.'" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk#Childhood_and_family https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk#Childhood_and_family
  - jlmorton 4y ago
    When people start using abstract measures to describe something easily quantifiable, it's usually because they're dissembling. We have a pretty good idea what Errol's net worth is, and it's a couple million bucks. The emerald mine in question was purchased for the equivalent of $40,000.
    - Ralfp 4y ago
      Imagine arguing that somebody didn’t have financial backing because his dad sold plane and bought emerald mine for half of profit (in country then known for black worker exploitation) for $40.000, and is worth couple millions at best.
      - jlmorton 4y ago
        This is how every discussion on Errol Musk's wealth goes. Someone makes an implication that they were fabulously wealthy, using abstract measures like emerald mines, or small planes as a substitute for a concrete measure of wealth. Someone points out the value of both those things was actually quite low. Then the goal posts shift to how much more money the Musk family had than the average family, which is true enough. But they were still decidedly middle class. They all had to work for a living. And in American terms, there are tens of millions of households with similar wealth. Upper middle class, to be sure, but nothing unusual. And the emerald mine, such as it was, is said to have been in Zambia, not South Africa.
        Ralfp 4y ago
        > Then the goal posts shift to how much more money the Musk family had than the average family, which is true enough. There's hardly a move of goalpost here. People merely argue that showing Elon as self-made "in parent's garage" is bullshit. He had family with capabilities to enable him to participate in ecoms bubble. > Zambia, not South Africa "You are wrong, that labour camp wasn't in USSR but in North Korea." I've haven't named the country BTW.
        NhanH 4y ago
- mikeyouse 4y ago
  Meh, whatever you think of the 'angle' of the NYTimes article, it was pretty clear from talking to his classmates that they were in a very wealthy area of Joberg.. his dad was successful in business (being part owner of at least one mineral mine) and was a local politician. > Interviews with relatives and former classmates reveal an upbringing in elite, segregated white communities that were littered with anti-Black government propaganda, and detached from the atrocities that white political leaders inflicted on the Black majority. > Mr. Musk, 50, grew up in the economic hub of Johannesburg, the executive capital of Pretoria and the coastal city of Durban. His suburban communities were largely shrouded in misinformation. Newspapers sometimes arrived on doorsteps with whole sections blacked out, and nightly news bulletins ended with the national anthem and an image of the national flag flapping as the names of white young men who were killed fighting for the government scrolled on the screen. > “We were really clueless as white South African teenagers. Really clueless,” said Melanie Cheary, a classmate of Mr. Musk’s during the two years he spent at Bryanston High School in the northern suburbs of Johannesburg, where Black people were rarely seen other than in service of white families living in palatial homes. They go onto say that Musk had black friends and left SA to avoid serving the apartheid government via mandatory military service.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- mattigames 4y ago
  - lijogdfljk 4y ago
    Ah, middle class.
    - coinbasetwwa 4y ago
      Pretty much, looks like Tudor style homes in PA that sell for $400k.
      - ineedasername 4y ago
        That doesn't mean it was the local equivalent of a $400k home. Local marketplace matters. Near me, within the same 10-mile radius, that house would cost between $800k to $5M depending on the specific location, but I'd say $400k would be the absolute floor on price just about anywhere in the US.
        lijogdfljk 4y ago
        Yea, my house is a 10th of that probably and it's a 500k home in the PNW. That home looks very well built, upper upper middle "at best"
    - ineedasername 4y ago
      Certainly much more firmly middle class than the GP comment's "at best" would imply.
- ineedasername 4y ago
  Incorrect. Earlier on, his parents were well educated and had good jobs, and enough money that his father owned an airplane. This alone makes your "at best" remark highly inaccurate. At a minimum in Musk's early life he was very comfortably in the middle of the middle class, but I would class nearly any family with enough disposable income to have an airplane to be "wealthy". Your standards for this may vary, and I'm open to your definition of wealthy being much higher, but his family was far from poor. On top of that, his father has claimes he sold the plane for the equivalent of about $300,000 in today's money and used some of it to purchase shares in gemstone mine, which then went on to make them even wealthier. This isn't independently confirmed. His father may have exaggerated. However others have said his family also own the largest house in the area, which sounds wealthy to me. Elon has disputed some of this, but not offered details beyond merely disputing some of this. He said his parents have been supported financially for the last 20 years, but going back 20 years from when he made that statement would put it in the late 90's, so it is not incompatible with growing up wealthy even though he now supports his parents. Plenty of multi-millionaires would tell their parents, "Hey, if you don't want to you don't have to work anymore. I got this". Also none of this is incompatible with Elon's own account of arriving in Canada with little money & ending up with student debt. It's possible Elon exaggerated but for these purposes I'll take him at his word. Because by his own account Elon didn't like Apartheid. His father also has a reputation of being quite an asshole. It would be perfectly understandable for him to "peace out" and go his own way, and it wouldn't change the fact that growing up his family was wealthy. In fact I know someone who did pretty much the same thing: Their father was terrorized the family in fear & abuse, but was extremely successful with a very expensive first house, another vacation home, etc. His father wanted him to continue in his (professional) footsteps but he wanted none of it, joined the military for the free education and after getting out went on to become extremely wealthy himself.
  - coinbasetwwa 4y ago
    Most people who are into airplanes or boats scrounge by considerably to be able to afford one for leisure. Which is evident by the fact that he had to flip his hobby plane to fund a business purchase.
- rchaud 4y ago
  A "middle class" South African with a Canadian passport in his back pocket acting as an escape hatch for when apartheid was close to collapsing.
fartcannon 4y ago
That's a long way to says he's a bit of a dick.
- mekoka 4y ago
  Your one liner totally fails to embody what was said.
  - jyounker 4y ago
    While failing to provide a historical account, it summed up the result quite concisely.
    - mekoka 4y ago
      If you go back to the question that was being answered, you'll notice that the historical account was the point. > if he was always like that or grew into it at one point.
      - fartcannon 4y ago
        Yeah, no I agree with you. I would delete it if I could but the time has past. I guess I'm kind of a dick, too.
- mmastrac 4y ago
  Sometimes going the long way around is what's necessary.
  - pm90 4y ago
    not this time though
- ineedasername 4y ago
  He's a divisive figure, and people who like him will tune out if someone doesn't like him, and people who don't like him will tune out when someone likes him. So, I tried to walk the line without using judgmental language. My own opinion is that he's a complicated figure. I can't come to a firm judgement on him because I don't know how much of what we see is truly him, how much of it is an act, and if it's truly him whether or not it's a representative small slice of him or not. I have a firm judgement on his his public persona, which I think makes him look like an asshole (the pedo guy stuff alone clinches that) but even if that's an accurate picture of him as a whole I still admire what he has accomplished.
croes 4y ago
Richest person ever? Not even close https://www.theweek.co.uk/news/people/954992/who-is-the-richest-person-of-all-time https://www.theweek.co.uk/news/people/954992/who-is-the-rich...
- ineedasername 4y ago
  It's hard to compare people who lived under vastly different economic systems. I would also put people who were the leaders of their country into a different category: the line between what they own and what is part of the nation's wealth is very blurry. I think even for more recent private individuals like the Carnegies it's a little more complicated than taking assets multiplied by inflation rates. Spending power also comes into it, and you could use another measure like net worth as a % of GDP. Musk may still fall short in those ways, which is why I made the "ever" a question. Poking around the internet a bit more-- your link & others-- it seems pretty likely. Then again I'm not sure there can really be a meaningful difference in wealth between anyone who was worth the equivalent of > $100B in todays money, however it's calculated. (Possibly you'd distinguish between money on paper vs. more tangible assets. Or some method of distinguishing Musk's wealth, a lot of which seems based on the speculative future value of Tesla than based in its current operations)
  - zozbot234 4y ago
    Yes, that article is doing some really weird comparisons. JD Rockfeller's net worth was no higher than $24B in modern inflation-adjusted dollars, but the article claims more than 10x that figure.
carlivar 4y ago
His bad decision (to migrate to Windows) at PayPal caused an engineering mutiny and led to the board firing him as CEO. So I think he has always been stubborn and impulsive.
- ineedasername 4y ago
  I'd have to know more about it. Did he have any reason for moving to windows? If there was a sound business case then I wouldn't call it impulsive. Even if it was impulsive, I don't think it falls into the same category as what we see from him today.
  - carlivar 4y ago
    My opinion is that he had no GOOD reason. He just knew the Windows dev stack and has a giant ego. But, I'm probably biased since he reminds me of managers/PMs I've worked with in my career that have weak opinions strongly held which affect me. I think it's similar to how he has banned use of Kanban or other Toyota Production System principles at Tesla (which is the easy explanation for their poor build quality, see: U.S. car manufacturing 1970's).
    - hef19898 4y ago
      Which is ironic, Tesla is running one of Toyotas former top tier factories outside of Japan. A joint venture with GM at that.
      - carlivar 4y ago
        Oh yeah totally ironic. The factory where Toyota taught GM how to make cars reliably has completely regressed to a mess of scrap and tents. They even got rid of the railroad siding which seems crazy to me for a pro-environment company.
mlindner 4y ago
> He went from being wealthy growing up He wasn't especially wealthy growing up, to be clear. Upper class yes, but no more "wealthy" than a successful silicon valley engineer's child.
- ineedasername 4y ago
  I would generally consider upper class to be wealthy, of course it's not a very specific term, individual definitions are going to vary greatly. A successful SV engineer old enough to have kids can easily be worth a few $million. That seems wealthy to me, but it's a subjective measure. I guess you could survey a bunch of people to try & get consensus on it, and evaluate the benchmark from there.
kaczordon 4y ago
Source that he was really wealthy growing up? People seem to say this all the time but he says he worked his way through college without any help from his dad: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1211071324518531072 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1211071324518531072
- ineedasername 4y ago
  You added the "really". Otherwise I don't bother posting sources for every single thing that is easy to find online. Elon disputes some accounts of his family's wealth, but also doesn't offer much else on the topic except that he arrived in Canada with little money and ended with student debt. This is not incompatible with growing up in a wealthy family. People peace-out from their family for all sorts of reasons, and Elon himself gives a great one when he said he didn't want to be a part of apartheid, and that his father was a terrible person. I know someone who did that because of a similar father issue: very wealthy family, and the person wanted no part of his father's help once he was old enough to leave home. By the father's own account they owned a plane worth about $300,000 in today's money. That alone-- enough to have a luxury good of that value-- is enough to put someone down as wealthy to me.
ALittleLight 4y ago
To me this seems more like - with the stock market down Elon figures he can get a discount on Twitter and so will now try to renegotiate the price. If you were buying a house, and had already made an offer and put down 3% earnest money with your offer, but then realized you could probably get 30% off the purchase price by backing out and offering again - would you?
- anonAndOn 4y ago
  Good point - A former colleague made an asking price offer on a house in 2007 that was rejected by the sellers. He bought the same house a year later from them for 70% of his original offer thanks to the Great Recession.

zionic 4y ago

>He went from being wealthy growing up This most definitely is false. Elon grew up middle class at best.

bthrn 4y ago
His dad was half owner of an emerald mine. From wikipedia: "The family was very wealthy in Elon's youth; Errol Musk once said, 'We had so much money at times we couldn't even close our safe.'" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk#Childhood_and_family https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk#Childhood_and_family
- jlmorton 4y ago
  When people start using abstract measures to describe something easily quantifiable, it's usually because they're dissembling. We have a pretty good idea what Errol's net worth is, and it's a couple million bucks. The emerald mine in question was purchased for the equivalent of $40,000.
  - Ralfp 4y ago
    Imagine arguing that somebody didn’t have financial backing because his dad sold plane and bought emerald mine for half of profit (in country then known for black worker exploitation) for $40.000, and is worth couple millions at best.
    - jlmorton 4y ago
      This is how every discussion on Errol Musk's wealth goes. Someone makes an implication that they were fabulously wealthy, using abstract measures like emerald mines, or small planes as a substitute for a concrete measure of wealth. Someone points out the value of both those things was actually quite low. Then the goal posts shift to how much more money the Musk family had than the average family, which is true enough. But they were still decidedly middle class. They all had to work for a living. And in American terms, there are tens of millions of households with similar wealth. Upper middle class, to be sure, but nothing unusual. And the emerald mine, such as it was, is said to have been in Zambia, not South Africa.
      - Ralfp 4y ago
        > Then the goal posts shift to how much more money the Musk family had than the average family, which is true enough. There's hardly a move of goalpost here. People merely argue that showing Elon as self-made "in parent's garage" is bullshit. He had family with capabilities to enable him to participate in ecoms bubble. > Zambia, not South Africa "You are wrong, that labour camp wasn't in USSR but in North Korea." I've haven't named the country BTW.
      - NhanH 4y ago
mikeyouse 4y ago
Meh, whatever you think of the 'angle' of the NYTimes article, it was pretty clear from talking to his classmates that they were in a very wealthy area of Joberg.. his dad was successful in business (being part owner of at least one mineral mine) and was a local politician. > Interviews with relatives and former classmates reveal an upbringing in elite, segregated white communities that were littered with anti-Black government propaganda, and detached from the atrocities that white political leaders inflicted on the Black majority. > Mr. Musk, 50, grew up in the economic hub of Johannesburg, the executive capital of Pretoria and the coastal city of Durban. His suburban communities were largely shrouded in misinformation. Newspapers sometimes arrived on doorsteps with whole sections blacked out, and nightly news bulletins ended with the national anthem and an image of the national flag flapping as the names of white young men who were killed fighting for the government scrolled on the screen. > “We were really clueless as white South African teenagers. Really clueless,” said Melanie Cheary, a classmate of Mr. Musk’s during the two years he spent at Bryanston High School in the northern suburbs of Johannesburg, where Black people were rarely seen other than in service of white families living in palatial homes. They go onto say that Musk had black friends and left SA to avoid serving the apartheid government via mandatory military service.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
mattigames 4y ago
- lijogdfljk 4y ago
  Ah, middle class.
  - coinbasetwwa 4y ago
    Pretty much, looks like Tudor style homes in PA that sell for $400k.
    - ineedasername 4y ago
      That doesn't mean it was the local equivalent of a $400k home. Local marketplace matters. Near me, within the same 10-mile radius, that house would cost between $800k to $5M depending on the specific location, but I'd say $400k would be the absolute floor on price just about anywhere in the US.
      - lijogdfljk 4y ago
        Yea, my house is a 10th of that probably and it's a 500k home in the PNW. That home looks very well built, upper upper middle "at best"
  - ineedasername 4y ago
    Certainly much more firmly middle class than the GP comment's "at best" would imply.
ineedasername 4y ago
Incorrect. Earlier on, his parents were well educated and had good jobs, and enough money that his father owned an airplane. This alone makes your "at best" remark highly inaccurate. At a minimum in Musk's early life he was very comfortably in the middle of the middle class, but I would class nearly any family with enough disposable income to have an airplane to be "wealthy". Your standards for this may vary, and I'm open to your definition of wealthy being much higher, but his family was far from poor. On top of that, his father has claimes he sold the plane for the equivalent of about $300,000 in today's money and used some of it to purchase shares in gemstone mine, which then went on to make them even wealthier. This isn't independently confirmed. His father may have exaggerated. However others have said his family also own the largest house in the area, which sounds wealthy to me. Elon has disputed some of this, but not offered details beyond merely disputing some of this. He said his parents have been supported financially for the last 20 years, but going back 20 years from when he made that statement would put it in the late 90's, so it is not incompatible with growing up wealthy even though he now supports his parents. Plenty of multi-millionaires would tell their parents, "Hey, if you don't want to you don't have to work anymore. I got this". Also none of this is incompatible with Elon's own account of arriving in Canada with little money & ending up with student debt. It's possible Elon exaggerated but for these purposes I'll take him at his word. Because by his own account Elon didn't like Apartheid. His father also has a reputation of being quite an asshole. It would be perfectly understandable for him to "peace out" and go his own way, and it wouldn't change the fact that growing up his family was wealthy. In fact I know someone who did pretty much the same thing: Their father was terrorized the family in fear & abuse, but was extremely successful with a very expensive first house, another vacation home, etc. His father wanted him to continue in his (professional) footsteps but he wanted none of it, joined the military for the free education and after getting out went on to become extremely wealthy himself.
- coinbasetwwa 4y ago
  Most people who are into airplanes or boats scrounge by considerably to be able to afford one for leisure. Which is evident by the fact that he had to flip his hobby plane to fund a business purchase.
rchaud 4y ago
A "middle class" South African with a Canadian passport in his back pocket acting as an escape hatch for when apartheid was close to collapsing.

fartcannon 4y ago

That's a long way to says he's a bit of a dick.

mekoka 4y ago
Your one liner totally fails to embody what was said.
- jyounker 4y ago
  While failing to provide a historical account, it summed up the result quite concisely.
  - mekoka 4y ago
    If you go back to the question that was being answered, you'll notice that the historical account was the point. > if he was always like that or grew into it at one point.
    - fartcannon 4y ago
      Yeah, no I agree with you. I would delete it if I could but the time has past. I guess I'm kind of a dick, too.
mmastrac 4y ago
Sometimes going the long way around is what's necessary.
- pm90 4y ago
  not this time though
ineedasername 4y ago
He's a divisive figure, and people who like him will tune out if someone doesn't like him, and people who don't like him will tune out when someone likes him. So, I tried to walk the line without using judgmental language. My own opinion is that he's a complicated figure. I can't come to a firm judgement on him because I don't know how much of what we see is truly him, how much of it is an act, and if it's truly him whether or not it's a representative small slice of him or not. I have a firm judgement on his his public persona, which I think makes him look like an asshole (the pedo guy stuff alone clinches that) but even if that's an accurate picture of him as a whole I still admire what he has accomplished.

croes 4y ago

Richest person ever? Not even close https://www.theweek.co.uk/news/people/954992/who-is-the-richest-person-of-all-time https://www.theweek.co.uk/news/people/954992/who-is-the-rich...

ineedasername 4y ago
It's hard to compare people who lived under vastly different economic systems. I would also put people who were the leaders of their country into a different category: the line between what they own and what is part of the nation's wealth is very blurry. I think even for more recent private individuals like the Carnegies it's a little more complicated than taking assets multiplied by inflation rates. Spending power also comes into it, and you could use another measure like net worth as a % of GDP. Musk may still fall short in those ways, which is why I made the "ever" a question. Poking around the internet a bit more-- your link & others-- it seems pretty likely. Then again I'm not sure there can really be a meaningful difference in wealth between anyone who was worth the equivalent of > $100B in todays money, however it's calculated. (Possibly you'd distinguish between money on paper vs. more tangible assets. Or some method of distinguishing Musk's wealth, a lot of which seems based on the speculative future value of Tesla than based in its current operations)
- zozbot234 4y ago
  Yes, that article is doing some really weird comparisons. JD Rockfeller's net worth was no higher than $24B in modern inflation-adjusted dollars, but the article claims more than 10x that figure.

carlivar 4y ago

His bad decision (to migrate to Windows) at PayPal caused an engineering mutiny and led to the board firing him as CEO. So I think he has always been stubborn and impulsive.

ineedasername 4y ago
I'd have to know more about it. Did he have any reason for moving to windows? If there was a sound business case then I wouldn't call it impulsive. Even if it was impulsive, I don't think it falls into the same category as what we see from him today.
- carlivar 4y ago
  My opinion is that he had no GOOD reason. He just knew the Windows dev stack and has a giant ego. But, I'm probably biased since he reminds me of managers/PMs I've worked with in my career that have weak opinions strongly held which affect me. I think it's similar to how he has banned use of Kanban or other Toyota Production System principles at Tesla (which is the easy explanation for their poor build quality, see: U.S. car manufacturing 1970's).
  - hef19898 4y ago
    Which is ironic, Tesla is running one of Toyotas former top tier factories outside of Japan. A joint venture with GM at that.
    - carlivar 4y ago
      Oh yeah totally ironic. The factory where Toyota taught GM how to make cars reliably has completely regressed to a mess of scrap and tents. They even got rid of the railroad siding which seems crazy to me for a pro-environment company.

mlindner 4y ago

> He went from being wealthy growing up He wasn't especially wealthy growing up, to be clear. Upper class yes, but no more "wealthy" than a successful silicon valley engineer's child.

ineedasername 4y ago
I would generally consider upper class to be wealthy, of course it's not a very specific term, individual definitions are going to vary greatly. A successful SV engineer old enough to have kids can easily be worth a few $million. That seems wealthy to me, but it's a subjective measure. I guess you could survey a bunch of people to try & get consensus on it, and evaluate the benchmark from there.

kaczordon 4y ago

Source that he was really wealthy growing up? People seem to say this all the time but he says he worked his way through college without any help from his dad: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1211071324518531072 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1211071324518531072

ineedasername 4y ago
You added the "really". Otherwise I don't bother posting sources for every single thing that is easy to find online. Elon disputes some accounts of his family's wealth, but also doesn't offer much else on the topic except that he arrived in Canada with little money and ended with student debt. This is not incompatible with growing up in a wealthy family. People peace-out from their family for all sorts of reasons, and Elon himself gives a great one when he said he didn't want to be a part of apartheid, and that his father was a terrible person. I know someone who did that because of a similar father issue: very wealthy family, and the person wanted no part of his father's help once he was old enough to leave home. By the father's own account they owned a plane worth about $300,000 in today's money. That alone-- enough to have a luxury good of that value-- is enough to put someone down as wealthy to me.

ALittleLight 4y ago

To me this seems more like - with the stock market down Elon figures he can get a discount on Twitter and so will now try to renegotiate the price. If you were buying a house, and had already made an offer and put down 3% earnest money with your offer, but then realized you could probably get 30% off the purchase price by backing out and offering again - would you?

anonAndOn 4y ago
Good point - A former colleague made an asking price offer on a house in 2007 that was rejected by the sellers. He bought the same house a year later from them for 70% of his original offer thanks to the Great Recession.