8 ms·
You can have a middle class salary, save well, and become a millionaire in time for retirement. In fact, at retirement age you really need millions nowadays. No
by marricks 4y ago
You can have a middle class salary, save well, and become a millionaire in time for retirement. In fact, at retirement age you really need millions nowadays. Not that most people have that. And most of those retirement age millionaires wouldn't have hundreds of thousands to lend.
I'm talking about billionaires, and what I contend is most billionaires had parents or family members who were rich which helped them.
- Elon Musk's parents owned an emerald mine in S. Africa
- Bill Gates not only got seed money from his millionaire parents but one of his parents was on the board of IBM and helped him land early Microsoft deals
- Bezos got 300k seed money from his parents
- Zuckerberg, is maybe an exception? His parents were only upper middle class. Enough money for good schools and private CS tutors. Seems plausible that if he was lower middle class he wouldn't have made it to Harvard.
- Chris2048 4y ago> - Elon Musk's parents owned an emerald mine in S. Africa Elon disputes this.
- marricks 4y agoHe disputed his way into becoming a co-founder of Tesla so I'm not surprised.
- Cederfjard 4y agohttps://www.businessinsider.co.za/how-elon-musks-family-came-to-own-an-emerald-mine-2018-2 https://www.businessinsider.co.za/how-elon-musks-family-came... TL;DR: In the 80s, Elon’s father sold a plane for $80k, half in cash, and the rest for 50% of a Zambian emerald mine. He had it for six years and made some good money off it, but probably not a ludicrous amount. One can imagine there being exploitative working conditions in that mine, given the time and place, but I don’t have any real knowledge on the matter.
- Chris2048 4y agoThe source is musks father, and Elon disputes what he claims.
- Cederfjard 4y agohttps://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1375214071809642496 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1375214071809642496 https://savingjournalism.substack.com/p/i-talked-to-elon-musk-about-journalism https://savingjournalism.substack.com/p/i-talked-to-elon-mus... This is what I could find with a quick search regarding what Elon himself claims. I had a skim and it doesn’t seem to necessarily contradict the article I linked or my summary (perhaps depending on your definition of ”good money”). There probably was an emerald mine, and yeah it probably didn’t yield enough for Musk’s father to have the family set for life or anything like that.
- Chris2048 4y agoHere's a tweet from Elon: "... There’s no evidence whatsoever of an “emerald mine”" https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1375212880790913025 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1375212880790913025 and more detailed article: https://savingjournalism.substack.com/p/i-talked-to-elon-musk-about-journalism https://savingjournalism.substack.com/p/i-talked-to-elon-mus...
- nxmnxm99 4y agoOnly armchair socialists would take a guy coming from a broken home in one of the poorest regions of the world as a golden spoon to push their agenda lol