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by Chris2048 1025 days ago
> Oh, most people don't start off rich?

How rich did Elon start off?

2 comments

Other than having fairly wealthy parents and family?

His payoff from paypal is not something most people will have access to. The dot com boom was basically a lottery.

Before Paypal he sold a rudimentary yellow pages search engine to Compaq for $305 million so that they could merge it into their search engine.

Compaq managed to sell AltaVista for $2.3 billion 6 months later and not long before the crash so maybe it wasn't the stupidest move on their side.

How wealthy were his parents and family? How many other people have parents and family that wealthy, or wealthier? How many of them end up being $100+ billionaires?
Many people are "fairly wealthy", yet don't end up as billionaires e.g. many doctors, lawyers or SWEs.

Elon family riches is uncertain: https://futurism.com/elon-musk-dad-emerald-mine

To be fair he made most of his initial wealth during the dot.com psychosis...

Not saying he isn't one of the greatest businessmen in history (well... assuming he's running Twitter to the ground for shits & giggles anyway) but selling a company for hundreds of millions back in those days does not necessarily was not necessarily that different from winning the lottery (being at the right time and the right place was enough).

> To be fair he made most of his initial wealth during the dot.com psychosis...

And now make money in another, partly self-created psychosis

Tesla is pretty legit though, SpaceX too. Whatever I might think about him as a person I don't see how can someone deny that Tesla is running circles around all traditional car manufacturers.
They falsify so much, I don't know what is happening there. All I know they get lot of funding, which has happened with complete scams (everyone says it can't be a scam, until they knew it all along) and successes, and everything in between.
They delivered almost a million cars this year, I don't see how could they falsify something like that.

>They falsify so much

What do you even mean by that? Whom did Tesla scam?