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>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
          A million dollars in 1970-1980 is worth around 3 to 7 million dollars now. 3 millions in that period is worth at least 10 millions right now. And there is decidedly not tens of millions of households in the US with that networth, let alone a single person.
          • jlmorton 4y ago
            To be clear, his net worth is a couple million dollars today.
        • mrtranscendence 4y ago
          As someone pointed out in another comment, "wealthy" does not mean "never having to work again". My life growing up would have been dramatically different if my parents had been worth even a low amount of millions, and the opportunities available to me would have been drastically higher.
    • ineedasername 4y ago
      In today's money it's the equivalent of about $150,000, and funded by selling a plane that sold for twice that amount. I would classify having enough disposable income to own a $300,000 plane & a net worth of a few million to be wealthy. I should note that my working definition of "wealthy" doesn't mean they never have to work again, or don't have to work to maintain their desired lifestyle. Other people may have different benchmarks. As you said, abstract measures aren't easily quantified, and someone else's benchmark for wealthy may be higher.
      • nailer 4y ago
        > I would classify a net worth of a few million to be wealthy. This describes many boomers that simply own a house.
        • unclebucknasty 4y ago
          >This describes most boomers and older GenXs. It most assuredly does not.
          • jlmorton 4y ago
            The median net worth of the Baby Boomer generation in America is $1.2 million.
            • gilbetron 4y ago
              Median net worth of boomers is $200k, average net worth is $1.2m because there are a lot of very rich boomers. https://www.businessinsider.com/typical-baby-boomer-net-worth-debt-real-estate-retirement-2021-12#the-typical-boomer-has-a-median-net-worth-of-206700-6 https://www.businessinsider.com/typical-baby-boomer-net-wort...
              • nailer 4y ago
                > Median net worth of boomers is $200k, average net worth is $1.2m That's not mathematically logical. 'Average' can be used to describe mean, median or mode.
    • weakfish 4y ago
      Couple million is still leagues above middle class
      • jlmorton 4y ago
        When we're discussing total net worth, a couple million dollars is decidedly middle class. In the US, there are 13.6 million households with a net worth over $1 million when excluding their primary residence, out of a total of 126 million households. Over 10% of households in the US, even when excluding the value of their home, have over a million dollars in assets.
        • weakfish 4y ago
          So 10% is middle class? Shouldn’t it be 35+?
    • memish 4y ago
      Besides that, Elon didn't inherit that wealth. He moved to Canada with little money, worked blue collar jobs and had student debt. That's what he started with. At Zip2 he couldn't afford a second computer. People WANT to believe a mythology that Elon started off rich to feel better about not accomplishing anything with their own equally or more privileged life. People that started with little themselves don't have this level of cognitive dissonance and see it more as an immigrant success story and inspiration.
      • corobo 4y ago
        > When he started Zip2 he couldn't afford a second computer What does this sentence mean, why’d he need a second computer? Parsing out the odd wording that means he could afford a computer What’s with the second computer? It’s proper nerd sniped me this haha
        • memish 4y ago
          One computer for development, one for a server. He couldn't afford a second so had to use his primary for both purposes.
          • corobo 4y ago
            Actually in fairness that does make sense given a bit of thought
      • jkestner 4y ago
        He got a $28,000 loan from his father when starting Zip2. The biggest privilege is having your family's security net, even if you don't use it. Musk has also had luck, being in the right time and place for the dot-com boom. Unlike a lot of people who grew up privileged, he's been a hustler with great business instincts. Unlike a lot of hustlers with great business instincts, he grew up privileged.
        • memish 4y ago
          The loan came later and he was no more privileged than the average Canadian or American at the time. People who dismiss it as privilege are projecting envy, full stop.
    • DyslexicAtheist 4y ago
      like anyone in developing countries and especially wealthy white South Africans do fit this bill rather well would hoard their actual private wealth in other jurisdictions. just because the company itself is worth nothing on paper doesn't mean they haven't pillaged the country resources for private gain like all the other wanna-be crooks and aspiring kleptocrats. [1][2] There is a good reason why the family left SA the moment apartheid was abolished and why Elon Musk never went back since the end of apartheid. Every entitled chuckle-duck born with a silver spoon in their mouth likes to launder their past to make them look self-made. Elon is no different. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treasure_Islands:_Tax_Havens_and_the_Men_Who_Stole_the_World https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treasure_Islands:_Tax_Havens_a... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleptopia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleptopia
  • nullc 4y ago
    Well right now the highest value note in south Africa is worth about $13. I'm sure many HN regulars have homes costing much more than a safe full of $13 notes. I wouldn't be too confident that "We had so much money at times we couldn't even close our safe." is an amount of money that would actually make someone particularly wealthy by American standards without doing a fair bit of research on what currency that safe would have been full of and how much it had been worth at the time.
    • adamsmith143 4y ago
      Why would anything right now be relevant to Elon growing up 40 years ago?
      • nullc 4y ago
        > and how much it had been worth at the time
    • webmaven 4y ago
      Why assume that the safe was full of South African currency?
      • nullc 4y ago
        > a fair bit of research on what currency that safe would have been full of
        • webmaven 4y ago
          There are too many unknowns: the currency, the denominations, the size of the safe. There is little point in speculating whether it was (or was not) a life-changing sum.
    • _djo_ 4y ago
      At the time the South African Rand was kept somewhat pegged to the US Dollar, and has an average value of R2/$.
  • clickok 4y ago
    According to others, that story is severely embellished: https://savingjournalism.substack.com/p/i-talked-to-elon-musk-about-journalism?s=r https://savingjournalism.substack.com/p/i-talked-to-elon-mus...
  • ekianjo 4y ago
    Wikipedia is not a reliable source for every info in the world. I hope people realize that. It's funny that some people blindly trust what some unknown party has written on the net on any kind of subject.
    • samtho 4y ago
      Tertiary sources (e.g. encyclopedias) are inherently this way regardless of whether or not it is editable by nearly anyone. One of the strengths in Wikipedia is crowd sourcing and a strong editorial culture that, for example, enforces citing sources and giving unbiased takes, with mechanisms to mark problems with articles rather than deleting them. This ultimately leads to a degree of editorial transparency that is unmet by any other type of source of this kind.
      • paisawalla 4y ago
        Anyone who has tried to insert a true, but counter narrative, fact into a topical article know where the limits of your description are. For any popular topic, there are self-appointed watchdogs who will revert edits in bad faith and argue with you on the Talk page until you give up and go away. There aren't enough admins to adjudicate all disputes, so what you're reading on a controversial topic is often the product of the most stubborn arguers. That's how the sausage is made on WP.
      • ekianjo 4y ago
        > One of the strengths in Wikipedia is crowd sourcing and a strong editorial culture that, for example, enforces citing sources and giving unbiased takes, This is a laughable statement. That's assuming the newspapers acting as sources are devoid of bias, while we clearly know that they are partisan in the own right: even stuff that the NYT is heavily biased and can't be seriously used as a reference for everything. Crowd-sourcing is not a robust mechanism to prevent that from happening either. Just look at every controversial topic on Wikipedia, there is only one narrative that is accepted while the reality might be way more complex that what is portrayed in a paragraph.
    • DonHopkins 4y ago
  • starkd 4y ago
    Wikipedia is great for many things, but I would steer clear of it for biographical information of prominent contemporary persons. It's very political and the amount of on-the-fly stealth editing that goes on the site should discredit it. Great for technical information or basic history. Avoid it like the plague anywhere it seeks to weigh in on "the current thing".
    • DonHopkins 4y ago
      When you have to attack Wikipedia as being generically unreliable, instead of presenting some reliable facts and citations about the discussion topic that actually prove your point, you don't have a point.
      • nxm 4y ago
        Left bias is very prevalent: https://youtu.be/kiRgJYMw6YA https://youtu.be/kiRgJYMw6YA
      • BurningFrog 4y ago
        What facts would you believe? Elon himself tells a very different story: https://www.amazon.com/Elon-Musk-SpaceX-Fantastic-Future/dp/006230125X https://www.amazon.com/Elon-Musk-SpaceX-Fantastic-Future/dp/...
      • starkd 4y ago
        It has been a long-standing complaint for awhile. In partricular, there appears to be a core group of editors that have displayed a blatant bias against Israel. Huge ommissions of information that only inflame anti-semitic passions and hinder real dialogue from occuring. There are other issues, but this one shows the limitations of wikipedia and how a narrow mindset can comandeer a few pages. Again, I like wikipedia, but it's only reliable for mundane issues. https://aish.com/48964486/ https://aish.com/48964486/ https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/wikipedias-jewish-problem-pervasive-systemic-antisemitism/ https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/wikipedias-jewish-problem-pe...
        • starkd 4y ago
  • BurningFrog 4y ago
    It's well documented that Elon was quite poor as a student in Canada/US. He left South Africa at 17 with no money to speak of. He's estranged from his father for reasons no one talks about, which makes the father's possible wealth irrelevant. And yet this "apartheid emerald mine fortune" is such a good story that it will keep being "internet true" forever.
• 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.