His parents owned an emerald mine during apartheid where the working conditions for miners (all black, of course) could accurately be described as slavery. He was literally walking around with emeralds in his pockets like some fucked up little prince.
Anyway, that’s how he got his startup capital.
This is a common misconception. His daddy loaned him a whopping 28 grand. Nothing mind blowing, and certainly not what you’d expect the heir of a freaking emerald mine to get their hands on.
Elon Musk got most of his capital early in his career from the sale of his first company, Zip2, which he co-founded with his brother Kimbal in 1995 using $28,000 borrowed from their father[1][6]. In 1999, Zip2 was sold to Compaq for $307 million, with Musk earning $22 million[1][6]. Musk then invested $10 million of his Zip2 proceeds into founding X.com, one of the first attempts at online banking, which later became PayPal[1]. After PayPal, Musk invested all of his proceeds into his new projects: SpaceX ($100 million), Tesla ($70 million), and SolarCity ($10 million) [1]. By 2008, he was almost penniless and living on $200 thousand monthly loans from his friends after a $20 million divorce[1]. However, his fortunes changed, and by 2017, his net worth had risen to $16 billion[1].
Citations: [1] https://www.toptal.com/finance/venture-capital-consultants/elon-musks-investments [2] https://time.com/6127754/elon-musk-net-worth-person-of-the-year/ [3] https://money.com/8-innovative-ways-elon-musk-made-money-before-he-was-a-billionaire/ [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk [5] https://financebuzz.com/jobs-elon-musk-had-before-wealthy [6] https://www.sitebuilderreport.com/origin-stories/elon-musk>
Source for the pivotal claim: another article. The source of that article: a Rolling Stone interview of Musk himself.
You can’t trust malignant narcissists about themselves and their early lives, especially not ones like Musk who lies about the death of his own child
Okay, and the OP’s source for Elon’s success coming solely from daddy’s money and nothing else is what?
Musk has publicly laid out that anybody can get rich writing software without much startup capital - which not only makes sense but by all accounts seems to be exactly what he did.
There’s no need for anyone in the western world to frown upon that. Literally all of us started out with the wealth that our ancestors violently extracted from colonies.
Just because you didn’t personally inherit millions doesn’t change the structural fact. All our industries jump-started by getting stuff from colonies. It was a big rush among the colonizers, and those who didn’t do successful colonize are not among “first world” countries today.
Musk is guilty of much, but his sin in benefiting from his parents sins is different from yours only in scale.
Except I don’t deny my privilege, which is on such another scale as to be in a completely different world.
Besides, he doesn’t just pretends to be self-made, he downright believes that his success comes from him being a genetically superior genius. He is consciously siring as much offspring as he possibly can (10 so far, 9 surviving, one of which publicly disowned him) to provide the world with future heroes. To call him a regular level narcissist would be akin to call a tiger a slightly oversized house cat.
Lastly, I refuse to buy Nestlé products because some of them were made using slavery. Musk made his first fortune on the backs of slaves, treats his current employees as similarly to slaves as he can get away with and subjects them to both racist and sexual abuse.
I may have the privilege of being born a cishet white male in a rich country, but that does NOT mean that I’m the equivalent of Apartheid Emerald Boy. Scale matters and immense differences in scale matter immensely.
yea. not sure how true this is, but i do remember reading that the emerald mines business wasn’t as profitable as people think it is or smthg.
Admittedly it is not 100% true for all first world countries, when we’re discussing outside Europe it’s a slightly more complex. For America it was not colonialism but imperialism, but that doesn’t change the moral argument. Those states in Asia that are first world I don’t know enough to talk confidently (and with that you know I’m not ChatGPT)
