[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.