[Viker]

That is like listening to advice from Elon Musk, good advice but he always forgets that all the advice is worthless, if your father doesn't have a precious gem mine in Africa .... Bottom line will always be:

"Being born rich, is the only guarantee to succes. Everything else is pure luck."

You are either born rich, or lucky enough to hit the lottery.

[dstick]

I fully agree, but the parent mentions an important word: probability. Combined with your luck, and kept going by grit, you most surely have a recipe for success.

If everyone has 0.01% chance to become a millionaire (chance - that might not happen, or someone does not aspire to be). Then simple probability tells us that a person with grit that does not quit at the first attempt but tries 20 times, has a 0.2% chance.

“I’m a great believer in luck. I find that the harder I work, the more I have of it.” is a relevant quote :)

[hooande]

the point is that the child of a billionaire starts off with a 100% chance of being a millionaire. the rest of us can try for 50x or 100x longer than avg but the odds of getting to that level are still miniscule. and if that's the case it makes the whole endeavor seem rather arbitrary

[WalterBright]

It is not minuscule. For middle class people, the route to millionaire status is very doable. Live below your means, and regularly invest the difference.

For poor people, the route is to learn a valuable skill, move into the middle class, then apply the above.

[lordnacho]

That just moves the goal posts by a level, doesn't it? What's the chance you have a low stress upbringing that allows you to work towards such goals? Parents who are supportive and believe in that middle class dream, teachers who don't give up on you when you misbehave, enough comfort to not have to focus on immediate concerns?

[WalterBright]

You can blame your parents and teachers up until age 18, then it's on you.

[TheOtherHobbes]

Nonsense.

You can't rationally compare the life chances of someone whose parents are billionaires - with access to that network, and the best schooling, and discussions about investing over dinner - with someone born in a shack without a book in the house.

An incredibly tiny number of people will be able to do well from a near-zero start. And most will do it by being aggressively self-serving narcissists.

Everyone else is going to have a much tougher time.

[lordnacho]

That's one of those statements that's useful as an attitude, not so useful as an explanation.

I'm sure people can think of ways your parents influence you after the age of majority.

[anoncake]

Who you are depends on your upbringing, so no, it's never on you.

[doggodaddo78]

This is true. It takes money, knowledge, and connections to make money. It's like a virtuous cycle / differential equation (rate of increase proportional to the amount). A homeless person becoming a billionaire is highly-improbable vs. Steve Job's kids.

[zimpenfish]

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/07/21/luck-hard-work/ is an interesting delve into the origins of that phrase (and an amusing circular reference back to here.)

[undefined1]

> if your father doesn't have a precious gem mine in Africa

“This is a pretty awful lie,” Elon tweeted. “I left South Africa by myself when I was 17 with just a backpack & suitcase of books. Worked on my Mom’s cousin’s farm in Saskatchewan & a lumber mill in Vancouver. Went to Queens Univ with scholarship & debt, then same to UPenn/Wharton & Stanford.”

In a follow-up tweet, Elon said his father “didn’t own an emerald mine & I worked my way through college, ending up ~$100k in student debt.”

His mother Maye responded on Twitter in December 2019 in defense of Elon.

“To add to the truth, we went to Boston Chicken in Philadelphia for Thanksgiving because we couldn’t afford a turkey. And we spent three weeks making our rent-controlled apartment livable in Toronto,” Maye tweeted.

https://moguldom.com/278102/fact-check-did-elon-musk-inherit...

[bckr]

Interesting, I had never seen his denial of the emerald mine story or the student debt thing. I wonder what the truth is.

[jasonwatkinspdx]

Elon is being very deceptive with that "rebuttal."

Here's two articles on his father and how he got his fortune: https://www.businessinsider.co.za/how-elon-musks-family-came... and https://www.businessinsider.co.za/elon-musk-sells-the-family...

> “We were very wealthy,” says Errol. “We had so much money at times we couldn't even close our safe.”

Elon is cherry picking some true details to paint a misleading picture. I'm sure he did work in that lumber mill, and living with his mom at times of his life might have been a financial struggle. But the basic point, that he started out in business with family financial resources that the overwhelming majority of humans will never have, remains true.

If you pay close attention, Elon does this form of deception by selection quite often. It's one of the things that switched me from cheering him on for tesla, spacex, to now more critical and guarded.

[savanaly]

>But the basic point, that he started out in business with family financial resources that the overwhelming majority of humans will never have, remains true.

What does all that matter if you leave home at 17 with access to none of it? I'm not saying that's true, but it's what Elon implied and wasn't covered in your explanation how how his rebuttal is deceptive.

I myself have no doubt that he has his parents to thanks in large part for his success. But I would pin that on genetics rather than direct connections in his case. Personality traits like grit, intelligence, and ruthlessness are quite heritable, correlate with getting rich, and I think people forget about that when getting worked up about rich people's kids succeeding disproportionately.

[jasonwatkinspdx]

Well I mean Errol quite literally funded his first company.

But also, Errol had a very successful engineering business. There's no question that was a huge influence and advantage to Elon. He got an informal exposure to engineering at home that would be better than the universities available in some impoverished places.

The evidence for grit is nonexistent. What correlates most strongly with successful entrepreneurship is having upper middle class or better parents. This is because they provide a better education, literal seed funding, and if nothing else, allow someone to take more risk knowing they won't end up homeless.

[wilsonfiifi]

I think what you're missing is that to be successful you need someone to invest in you and your ideas. Whether it's your parents or a VC that point still remains true. However you still need to put in the work. So advice from Musk is still valuable in a way. Not all his advice though lol. You need to pick and choose what's relevant or applicable to your situation and that i think requires wisdom and discernment.

Now as to the question of what success is...

[lucianbr]

If you need to pick and choose wisely what advice to follow, then the advice is useless. Might as well pick and choose wisely what to do, directly.

[doggodaddo78]

Absolutely conflating apples and oranges. Elon seems to have been luckier by being part of the PayPal Mafia, similar, in a sense, to the w00w00 group. He may have absolutely no idea how or why he got where he did by the choices, beliefs, and circumstances he encountered. Felix Dennis OTOH was a wise, old hippie who had an appreciation for honest introspection.

[Viker]

Compeletley agree.

Elon was lucky to be born in a rich family. Made his first 100k before 18.

Felix was lucky to be born in time to ride that hippie wave.

Just like some people were lucky to throw money on bitcoin in 2010~2015.

Still more should be a credited to chanse and luck.

[zimpenfish]

> Felix was lucky to be born in time to ride that hippie wave.

"In 1969, Dennis wrote a world exclusive for OZ, the first ever review of Led Zeppelin's debut album." - talk about right place, right time. From there, he gets promoted to co-editor, gets hugely famous through a court case, which lets him start his own publishing company, and the rest is history.

(I'd say there was a lot of luck involved but he also seems to have reasonably good judgement and foresight to take advantage of it.)

[Mediterraneo10]

Dennis didn’t get rich off the Oz trial. In fact, he was pretty penniless for a good two years after the trial, and he did not have the kind of fame that he could capitalize on (the judge in the trial had infamously called him a dim-witted young man). What started his road to vast riches was noticing that Bruce Lee films were popular, and starting a new magazine called Kung Fu Monthly that, even though it was a pretty primitive rag, managed to cash in on the fad.

[matkoniecz]

> "Being born rich, is the only guarantee to succes. Everything else is pure luck."

Well, luck is an important part.

But some people managed to inherit fantastic wealth and be unsuccessful (even in keeping wealth!) anyway.

And to become rich you need luck, but it is not a pure luck!

You need both.

[FabiansMustDie]

Felix Dennis was "on the dole" (welfare) and wasn't born into riches -- unlike Elon.

Read the book. It's available on LibGen, and is absolutely worth coming back again to -- if you want to be rich.

[rdedev]

This is one datapoint. Not indicative of any route to success or making money

[throwawaysea]

This emerald mine story is commonly quoted by Elon Musk’s detractors but it is misinformation and has been explicitly labeled a myth by journalists who investigated it (https://www.insidehook.com/article/history/errol-musk-elon-f...). In terms of hard evidence, it’s not even clear that his father actually owned a mine, or what qualifies as a “mine”, or what its output was, or what his father’s income was from this mine. Most mines are small operations that amount to digging on a bit of land, with varying degrees of profit (or unprofitability), and not some massive corporate operation digging out those giant town-sized holes in the planet.

Musk, his brother, and mother left South Africa and moved to Canada, fleeing his allegedly abusive father. Elon held various odd jobs early on (https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/03/odd-jobs-elon-musk-had-when-...). He also worked his way through college and ended up with lots of student debt (https://marketrealist.com/p/elon-musk-emerald-mine/). That doesn’t match your narrative that he was born into riches and was successful only because of that.

I also know plenty of people who weren’t born rich and became successful via hard work and talent. It is pretty evident that their life priorities, work ethic, and other qualities are very different from the average person. To reduce their lifelong efforts and sacrifices to luck is really just a completely false narrative used by people today to undermine the idea of a meritocracy, since that’s necessary to ethically justify large redistributive policies, by labeling someone’s fortune as “unearned”. It’s the same reason why Musk’s detractors repeatedly reach for this emerald mine story without a shred of evidence.

[jasonwatkinspdx]

You are mistaken. Errol absolutely played a pivotal role in Elon's initial success:

https://www.sitebuilderreport.com/origin-stories/elon-musk

> Since Musk and Kimbal weren’t going to get any funding with a mere proof-of-concept, they had to build out the company using their own capital, and there wasn’t much of it. When Zip2 launched, Musk only had $2,000 in the bank. Kimbal had a bit more, having recently sold his share in a College Pro Painters franchise, but most of their startup costs were covered by their father, Errol Musk, who gave them $28,000 to get going.

Elon's "rebuttal" around this point is highly deceptive. Yes, his life with his mom was hard at times. But his dad did in actual fact have a half share in a Zambian emerald mine for 6 years. He was wealthy before that however, due to his engineering company.

So the truth is essentially "both." Did Elon struggle and have to show some grit at times? Yes. Did he get access to initial capital that many people wouldn't? Yes.