this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2023
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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. He eventually sold his share to Compaq for $22 million, and used that money to co-founded X.com, an online bank. X.com eventually did a merger with Paypal, giving Musk %11 of the shares of the merged company, which when Paypal was bought by eBay gave him $175.8 million. Next up was SpaceX, which he founded with that money. It wasn't until a few years later that he bought into an existing company, Tesla, using a $6.5 million investment to buy a majority share. Tesla was quite small then as car companies go and didn't build its first car until after Musk's acquisition.
Seems to me like a consistent pattern of building up companies from small to large and then cashing out to start the next one going.
I am in no way saying that Elon Musk is a good person or that he's doing well with Twitter (though we don't know the company's internal cash flows so it could actually be that it's becoming more profitable - we'll see in the long run). I'm just saying that this Reddit hivemind stuff is getting tedious and silly. He was not a "rich fuck" when he started out, I have more money right now than Musk did back then. He is not a moron. He's an asshole, an egotist, and not good at many things. But he's definitely good at some things and has done quite well by it.