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He didn't start off particularly wealthy.
Exactly! Who's parents don't have apartheid emerald mine money?!
Snopes article on the "emerald money" story. TLDR, "A story about Musk's father once owning an emerald mine evolved into a larger rumor that had no evidence to support its central claim."
Musk's first company was Zip2, which he co-founded with two other people and $28,000 of seed capital from his father.
i mean, that's still way more wealthy than most people. i don't think i know anybody who had 28,000 buckaroos of money to burn on their child's business venture. and the article that you linked does say that musk's dad made around 400,000 dollars off the emerald mine, which is... still more wealth than most people will see in their lifetime. according to Errol, he sent money he made off the emerald mine and by selling his yacht to Elon and Kimbal to pay for living expenses while they were studying in the US.
It's not easy to become a billionaire from 28,000 USD. Definitely not based on luck alone if you grow several businesses.
its not easy to become a billionaire. but i think that its disingenuous to suggest that 28,000 bucks of dad's money for your startup isn't in and of itself a privilege of the wealthy. starting a business is completely out of scope for most people. it can't make you a billionaire, but you can't be a billionaire unless you can start a business, and you can't do that without money to spend on that business in the vast majority of cases.
and the skill of running a business is just not impressive to me. there is no way to cultivate skill at entrepreneurship without doing entrepreneurial things, and that's just way easier to do if you can afford to fail, and have a way of making yourself the boss of other people. most people can't afford to fail, so they can't take risks with quantities of money they'll probably never accumulate in their lifetime.
Most people don't get seed money from their parents, but the median American will inherit $70K from their parents.
Regardless, most people who start a business can take out a loan. And to put things in perspective, even opening a fast food restaurant will require over $200K.
In other words, the advantage that $28K gave Musk was nowhere near enough to open a small restaurant, much less automatically turn him into a billionaire.
i really want to know where you got that figure, because a quick google search does not verify a median inheritance of 70k. there are some figures which report a mean inheritance of around that, but most are significantly lower, and this document suggests both that the median inheritance is around 8k across income groups, and that less that 7% of people are will receive any inheritance at all when averaged across all income groups. (the wealthier you are, the more likely you are to receive an inheritance).
and sure, most people who start a business can take out a loan, but there are a vast quantity of people who can't take out a loan, because they have bad credit, or do not want to take out a loan they know they will never be able to repay if they fail to get their business off the ground. rich people can afford to take more risks, can afford to not spend excess money that they have on making sure they get to eat next month, and thus are conferred specific structural advantages when starting, maintaining, and growing businesses.
i'm not saying that 28k can automatically turn him into a billionaire. i'm simply pointing out the truth, that Elon Musk did, in fact, benefit from structural advantages which cleared barriers to entry that the vast majority of people do not have the resources to bypass.
i get that people would really like it if he was some rags to riches story about a poor kid ascending up the ladder, but no. it isn't true about musk, and it isn't true about most billionaires. their wealth is unprecedented, sure, and they have leveraged their resources beyond what most people can conceive, but it bears repeating. statistically, most of the monstrously wealthy started out wealthy, had access to resources that the average person will never have from the start, and were only in a position to grow their wealth because they had money to burn on things other than food, shelter, and physical health.