>if he was always like that or grew into it at one point.
He went from being wealthy growing up, to being very rich after Paypal, to being an extremely rich billionaire, to being the most richest person in the world (maybe ever?). And now a single utterance of his can shape markets or otherwise influence millions of people.
I think it would be difficult to go through the above and not come out the other end without it impacting your behaviors & world view. At a minimum, before he was this wealthy & influential he didn't have as much margin for error. A single bad decision might have tanked Tesla or SpaceX when they were getting started. It would have required Musk to be a lot more careful & deliberate. He also had to care a bit more (or at least pretend to care) about other people's thoughts/ideas etc. These days he can lose $1B in a twitter acquisition breakup fee and it barely matters. And he has enough "f*ck off" money (the amount required to tell someone to "f*ck off" with no significant consequences) to tell anyone to f*ck off. The need to adhere to social niceties is greatly reduced.
This is all on top of the fact that the average person's behavior is usually going to change at least a little as they get older.
All of which is to say that I think there's an excellent chance that he's grown into his current personality. If so, I think it's very possible that it's a mixture: He grew into where he is now, but the seeds were always there & his track in life has amplified or caused those seeds to take hold.
"He’s obviously a visionary. I prefer dealing with him to others because he gives you genuine answers. He will call you back. He will have a beef with you when others run away because they’re cowardly. If he disagrees, he’ll be in your face, but at least he’s in your face. I’m perfectly fine with that. In a world where everybody’s making a lot of silly stuff, he’s not. Cars, rockets, solar, these are important things. He can’t be as silly or as fascist as people make him out to be. Maybe he does act like a stupid tech bro sometimes, but maybe he’s a little more complex than that? Thomas Edison was not a nice man. Many inventors were very difficult, problematic people — Steve Jobs, for example. The times we live in are so reductive that it’s really hard to be able to get our minds around a truly complex human being. And that’s what he is."
John Carmack's take: "Elon is definitely an engineer. He is deeply involved with technical decisions at spacex and Tesla. He doesn’t write code or do CAD today, but he is perfectly capable of doing so."
Kevin Watson's take, who developed the avionics for Falcon 9 and Dragon and previously managed the Advanced Computer Systems and Technologies Group within the Autonomous Systems Division at NASA's Jet Propulsion laboratory:
"Elon is brilliant. He’s involved in just about everything. He understands everything. If he asks you a question, you learn very quickly not to go give him a gut reaction.
He wants answers that get down to the fundamental laws of physics. One thing he understands really well is the physics of the rockets. He understands that like nobody else. The stuff I have seen him do in his head is crazy.
He can get in discussions about flying a satellite and whether we can make the right orbit and deliver Dragon at the same time and solve all these equations in real time. It’s amazing to watch the amount of knowledge he has accumulated over the years."
Garrett Reisman, engineer and former NASA astronaut:
"What's really remarkable to me is the breadth of his knowledge. I mean I've met a lot of super super smart people but they're usually super super smart on one thing and he's able to have conversations with our top engineers about the software, and the most arcane aspects of that and then he'll turn to our manufacturing engineers and have discussions about some really esoteric welding process for some crazy alloy and he'll just go back and forth and his ability to do that across the different technologies that go into rockets cars and everything else he does."
> Many inventors were very difficult, problematic people
Musk's not much of an inventor, though. Certainly, that's not why he's rich.
Part of the criticism of Musk is that the popular view of him is totally out of whack with what you get if you just look at what he does, and has done. He's not Tony Stark.
I think we need to distinguish between inventor (literally building new things themselves) vs executor (making stuff happen that would not have happened otherwise, or least not as quickly).
I think Elon falls much more into the second category, which I agree is not really like Tony Stark, but I think still provides a ton of value to society. I think there's a real argument to be made that he is the reason we have dropped cost per pound of payload to orbit by over half with reusable rockets, even if he himself didn't invent the functionality.
Oh, he deserves plenty of credit. He seems to be quite good at, at least, certain aspects of running a business, and happens to be interested in some fun and/or useful things, which is nice.
But he's not a super-genius, and given how flighty he can be, when he announces various Grand Visions, it's wise to take a wait-and-see approach. His big mouth probably ought to have landed him in quite a bit of legal trouble, too, except that it's so much harder for the justice system to deal with rich people than poor people.
It's not that he's uniquely awful among successful business dudes, since much of the above is true about many of them—his PR and superfans are just... grating.
Third category: Owner. Inventors invent things. Executors help them do so. Owners, the Edisons of the world, are the people with the property interest in the invention. They are the ones who get to deploy and use inventions within their business.
That said if you're a patron of inventors then you are an inventor. If you can manage the pain of failing and failing and failing, then in my book you're creative and a co-inventor.
Henry Ford seems an apt comparison. "Industrialist and business magnate", from Wikipedia's Henry Ford article, seems to pretty much cover it. Though with less of a focus on making products affordable for the normal person (which isn't necessarily a bad thing, just a difference in priorities).
That still makes him a pretty big deal, of course.
Yeah, Musk, Ford, Jobs, and Edison are all a big deal regardless of their role in actually inventing technology. I think Jobs is the most appropriate analog because he also has a public perception as being the person who created the tech which isn't really accurate. I'm not sure Ford had that reputation and Edison was more hands on.
It is also probably worth nothing that they all had another trait in common. They were all notorious assholes for various reasons.
Yeah, sorry, should have included that in my other post, but I do agree that Jobs is a decent analog, too. Similar public profile, sort-of similar reputation, though Jobs wasn't as prone to strident, public bullshitting.
Comparing him to Edison is appropriate I think, in both the good and bad ways that represents. I've also heard him compared with William C. Durant (Of GM circa 1910) which I think is also an appropriate comparison in both good and bad ways.
I agree, and think of him in much the same was as I think of Edison. It's strange how polarizing a figure Musk is. It seems like a majority of people (or maybe a vocal minority) either want to attribute every single thing to his own personal genius, no help from others or good fortune. While others view everything he's accomplished as nothing more than luck born out on the backs of other people's labor. I don't know where the balance lies between those two extremes but I doubt that either one is very accurate.
Is he really a visionary? Because from what I can tell, he has roughly the same background reading science fiction and making extrapolations from current science to the future, and has made similar conclusions about the risks of not multi-homing humanity, and the challenge of building intelligent non-humans. That doesn't make him a visionary.
My conclusion instead is that Elon Musk is Chaos Titan; like the netflix chaos monkey, but basically just going around causing chaos by hyping up twitter and then causing massive swings with individual tweets.
I don't mind Musk much either way and while I'm annoyed when he wants to let Trump back on Twitter after what I strongly believe was an attempt at a coup d'état, or him removing, say, the mobile charger in new Teslas I still like the products that his companies make and when he sits down and does an interview he says things that resonate with me.
So what makes someone a visionary? I mean I sit down and have a vision where Earth is a multi-planetary species, we build an outpost on the Moon within the next few years, and then Mars, and then mine asteroids. But is that all it takes? If so I think the word visionary is often either misapplied or is quite diluted. But if we take into account the need to execute on such visions, naturally, calling Musk a visionary makes more sense. Maybe we just don't have a great word (or one isn't immediately coming to mind) for someone who says "we should go to Mars, and I'm going to participate/lead in the creation of the entity that will do that".
Are you sure of this? Paypal truely was grand. Many people love their Teslas, and there is a (very strong, IMO) argument to be made that Tesla is the reason that the auto industry is transitioning, at least in part, to electric cars. Both of these seem like they are increasing the quality of life of the population.
Then comes SpaceX, doing engineering that NASA seems either incapable of or uninterested in (no specific blame on NASA, there is no substantial government push for progress in this area). OK, maybe you and I have not directly benefited from SpaceX yet, but do not discount the accruing benefit of cheap transport to space.
There are much, much, much easier ways to make money than to make an electric car company and a space company. Your argument is a little too cynical.
SpaceX built on existing engineering, and by some accounts isn't that much cheaper than Ariane 5 launches. It is bloody impressive so because it is a new company. Selling SpaceX as the saviours of space exploration and rocketry is a bit much so. It hirts to have Musks business, and other, attics overshadow that success.
> All he created was a financial bubble that he inflated to enrich himself for . work that he'll never actually deliver.
I literally drive a Tesla. I've watched SpaceX land reusable rockets and send people to the International Space Station. What you are saying here is factually incorrect and I'm really losing patience for this very obvious trolling and flame-baiting.
The entire history of this user's 3 day old green account is made up of this behavior. It's one thing for people to do this on HN, but to skirt the community conduct expectations by using a throwaway account is frankly frustrating to witness.
Congrats for being rich I guess? Your car brand is still as rare as Porsches, if you account for Europe it's still more rare on the road compared to Porsches.
Musk has been at the helm of Tesla since 2002. In FY21 Tesla accounted for 1% of vehicles sold globally. 1% in 20 years
I reapeat. 1% in 20 years. Hyper-growth for me (the stock market) , snail growth for thee (the American/global consumer)
For comparison in the US tesla had about a 2% market share in 2021, with Mazda at 2.3% and BMW group at 2.4%, and Toyota, the largest, at 15.5%, and Porsche at 0.46%.[2]
How many car startups in the last 50 years have made half as many cars as Tesla? Cars are an extremely competitive space. In my life in the last few years, Musk has gone from just a name on the internet to maker of a car I see on the streets at least once per day. That kind of progress is frankly undeniable. The same can be said of SpaceX - love Elon or hate him, there's no other company on earth doing what SpaceX does in the volume it does. I roll my eyes a lot at Musk on i.e. his Twitter takes, but I find the current zeitgeist of blind hate against him to be really reductive and boring. I feel like it's possible to be worried about his power, disagree with his politics, but also be impressed at the same time.
In addition to what other users have mentioned, I think the impact of the Starlink system in Ukraine is an example of where a Musk project has delivered significant value, and delivered that to people who are not in the upper stratas of western wealth. Starlink provided a swap-in alternative to Ukraine's disabled SATCOM infrastructure, realtime communications are a critical tool in this war.
As a side note, I would suggest reviewing HN's community guidelines regarding discussion of controversial issues and use of throwaway accounts. Respecting these guidelines would help your comments remain visible, rather than getting downvoted grey.[0]
> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
> Throwaway accounts are ok for sensitive information, but *please don't create accounts routinely. HN is a community—users should have an identity that others can relate to.*
WRT the last point, maybe you just found HN this week and this is your brand-new community identity, but your account name and posting activity doesn't give that impression.
> All he created was a financial bubble that he inflated to enrich himself for . work that he'll never actually deliver.
He's already delivered, one hundred times over. Continuously moving the goal posts of what you're criticizing doesn't suddenly make it a lack of delivery.
He's a divisive figure, and people who like him will tune out if someone doesn't like him, and people who don't like him will tune out when someone likes him.
So, I tried to walk the line without using judgmental language. My own opinion is that he's a complicated figure. I can't come to a firm judgement on him because I don't know how much of what we see is truly him, how much of it is an act, and if it's truly him whether or not it's a representative small slice of him or not. I have a firm judgement on his his public persona, which I think makes him look like an asshole (the pedo guy stuff alone clinches that) but even if that's an accurate picture of him as a whole I still admire what he has accomplished.
I'm not entirely sure these two opposites should have the same weight. Being a decent human should be the default and just some minor steps into shitty behaviour should be enough to justify significant criticism of a person. Consider the following generalisation on a random someone's behaviour:
Someone is sexist against 50% of the people the interact with? They are sexist.
Someone is sexist against 20% of the people the interact with? Still sexist.
That someone is sexist against 5% of the people the interact with? Still sexist.
The person does not stop being sexist/shitty/$negative_trait just because they most of the time are not acting on it. They become nice when they stop altogether, or at least make clear effort to stop.
So, back to Elon, considering his recent praise of work/life balance and slave-like conditions in China, I see no reason to believe his nice side should be considered equally or more worthy of praise than his negative side be considered for criticism.
Something like sexism, racism, etc are in a different category than merely "shitty", I think.
Putting Musk aside, I'd have to know a little more about what you mean by $negative_trait to agree or not. Everyone has negative traits, everyone is occasionally shitty. Frequency certainly matters, but assuming it's not very regular than maybe it comes down to what you said about "clear effort to stop". You have to be self aware enough to recognize it when it happens and work on doing better.
He is a complicated man and I think that's how history will look back on him. If he really does put people on Mars, I think that is about as big an impact on the history of the human race as one can have.
Everybody is flawed at some level. Maybe when you get to a certain level of fame and/or wealth it just amplifies all the good and bad in you.
I mean look at all the other “big names” in tech… Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs. These are highly flawed individuals.
Hell look at the entertainment industry… so many of the most famous successful people turn out to be hugely flawed. Take Jonny Depp for example—that dude has some major issues. Or to a much greater extent Bill Cosby. Cosby transformed TV in so many different incredibly positive ways and look how it ended…
> Fame and wealth does some weird stuff to people.
This is the crucial point. Power corrupts, a painful fact long established. Therefore, when the power and wealth of an individual grows, they deserve more scrutiny and criticism. You don't "give them a break because they're human". The self-preservation of society and freedom itself demands that we closely scrutinize the powerful. If you don't want to be scrutinized like that, then it's easy to avoid becoming a leader. It's a cliche, but with great power comes great responsibility, and Musk is still acting like a child half the time, egged on by a legion of equally childish fans.
> I can't come to a firm judgement on him because I don't know how much of what we see is truly him
I say all we can judge someone is what they do. It's perfectly fine to judge Musk on his public persona. Unless you want to try to divine secret reasons for his public actions, but even that is judging him based on his public persona.
I'm not saying you need to naively believe what he says are his motivations. But his public persona is at least somewhat predictable.
Every person is a bit of a dick in one way or another. And people who have done high impact things in their lives will have greater opportunity to have made mistakes, no matter how good, ethical, or smart they are.
Most elite celebrities, politicians, and businesspeople simply put a lot of effort into pretending to be perfect, mostly out of vanity. They lie, hide, avoid all controversy, and employ teams of PR people to craft their public image using publicity stunts, bribery, philanthropy and all kinds of tricks that have been proven to work for thousands of years.
If Elon Musk followed the elite PR playbook, a lot more people would like him, probably a lot of the haters in this thread. Which says more about them than him.
Elon Musk offers a glimpse of what very powerful/successful, and basically good, people are often really like.
I'd argue that:
1. Anyone who completely denigrates and dismisses Elon Musk is a blind hater.
2. Anyone who claims he's without flaws is a fanboy with rose colored glasses on.
3. And only people who agree with his own assessment of himself, that he's a "mixed bag", are assessing him clearly and with intellectual honesty.
Exactly. Nobody is perfect and everybody has some deep dark skeletons in their closet. The mistake I think society makes is expecting celebrities / wealthy to be any different.
Do they have a responsibility to set a positive example? Absolutely. Is that always achievable? Turns out probably not.
I think society needs to learn to forgive. We got really good at canceling people, but we haven’t got very good at forgiveness. In the internet age where your entire life can be saved on the internet, it is important to realize people change, everybody makes mistakes (sometimes even very stupid ones) and people aren’t perfect.
I don’t know… I guess they say you should never meet your heroes. I think now that we can peek behind the curtain and often see the “actual person” we have to come to terms with the fact that under all the fancy dress and act, even the “highest” in society are ultimately the same flawed, imperfect humans as the rest of us.
None of us really know what the fuck we are doing… we are all making it up as we go along. Even the most successful amongst us.
Yeah. I guess what I didn’t want to imply is we can’t be upset with their behavior. It’s okay to take serious issues with said behavior. It’s even okay to call out bad behavior
And yeah… the pedo guy thing was completely uncalled for.
His bad decision (to migrate to Windows) at PayPal caused an engineering mutiny and led to the board firing him as CEO. So I think he has always been stubborn and impulsive.
I'd have to know more about it. Did he have any reason for moving to windows? If there was a sound business case then I wouldn't call it impulsive. Even if it was impulsive, I don't think it falls into the same category as what we see from him today.
My opinion is that he had no GOOD reason. He just knew the Windows dev stack and has a giant ego. But, I'm probably biased since he reminds me of managers/PMs I've worked with in my career that have weak opinions strongly held which affect me.
I think it's similar to how he has banned use of Kanban or other Toyota Production System principles at Tesla (which is the easy explanation for their poor build quality, see: U.S. car manufacturing 1970's).
Oh yeah totally ironic. The factory where Toyota taught GM how to make cars reliably has completely regressed to a mess of scrap and tents. They even got rid of the railroad siding which seems crazy to me for a pro-environment company.
It's hard to compare people who lived under vastly different economic systems. I would also put people who were the leaders of their country into a different category: the line between what they own and what is part of the nation's wealth is very blurry. I think even for more recent private individuals like the Carnegies it's a little more complicated than taking assets multiplied by inflation rates. Spending power also comes into it, and you could use another measure like net worth as a % of GDP.
Musk may still fall short in those ways, which is why I made the "ever" a question. Poking around the internet a bit more-- your link & others-- it seems pretty likely. Then again I'm not sure there can really be a meaningful difference in wealth between anyone who was worth the equivalent of > $100B in todays money, however it's calculated. (Possibly you'd distinguish between money on paper vs. more tangible assets. Or some method of distinguishing Musk's wealth, a lot of which seems based on the speculative future value of Tesla than based in its current operations)
Yes, that article is doing some really weird comparisons. JD Rockfeller's net worth was no higher than $24B in modern inflation-adjusted dollars, but the article claims more than 10x that figure.
To me this seems more like - with the stock market down Elon figures he can get a discount on Twitter and so will now try to renegotiate the price.
If you were buying a house, and had already made an offer and put down 3% earnest money with your offer, but then realized you could probably get 30% off the purchase price by backing out and offering again - would you?
Good point - A former colleague made an asking price offer on a house in 2007 that was rejected by the sellers. He bought the same house a year later from them for 70% of his original offer thanks to the Great Recession.
You added the "really". Otherwise I don't bother posting sources for every single thing that is easy to find online.
Elon disputes some accounts of his family's wealth, but also doesn't offer much else on the topic except that he arrived in Canada with little money and ended with student debt. This is not incompatible with growing up in a wealthy family. People peace-out from their family for all sorts of reasons, and Elon himself gives a great one when he said he didn't want to be a part of apartheid, and that his father was a terrible person. I know someone who did that because of a similar father issue: very wealthy family, and the person wanted no part of his father's help once he was old enough to leave home.
By the father's own account they owned a plane worth about $300,000 in today's money. That alone-- enough to have a luxury good of that value-- is enough to put someone down as wealthy to me.
I would generally consider upper class to be wealthy, of course it's not a very specific term, individual definitions are going to vary greatly. A successful SV engineer old enough to have kids can easily be worth a few $million. That seems wealthy to me, but it's a subjective measure. I guess you could survey a bunch of people to try & get consensus on it, and evaluate the benchmark from there.
Incorrect. Earlier on, his parents were well educated and had good jobs, and enough money that his father owned an airplane. This alone makes your "at best" remark highly inaccurate. At a minimum in Musk's early life he was very comfortably in the middle of the middle class, but I would class nearly any family with enough disposable income to have an airplane to be "wealthy". Your standards for this may vary, and I'm open to your definition of wealthy being much higher, but his family was far from poor.
On top of that, his father has claimes he sold the plane for the equivalent of about $300,000 in today's money and used some of it to purchase shares in gemstone mine, which then went on to make them even wealthier. This isn't independently confirmed. His father may have exaggerated. However others have said his family also own the largest house in the area, which sounds wealthy to me.
Elon has disputed some of this, but not offered details beyond merely disputing some of this. He said his parents have been supported financially for the last 20 years, but going back 20 years from when he made that statement would put it in the late 90's, so it is not incompatible with growing up wealthy even though he now supports his parents. Plenty of multi-millionaires would tell their parents, "Hey, if you don't want to you don't have to work anymore. I got this".
Also none of this is incompatible with Elon's own account of arriving in Canada with little money & ending up with student debt. It's possible Elon exaggerated but for these purposes I'll take him at his word. Because by his own account Elon didn't like Apartheid. His father also has a reputation of being quite an asshole. It would be perfectly understandable for him to "peace out" and go his own way, and it wouldn't change the fact that growing up his family was wealthy. In fact I know someone who did pretty much the same thing: Their father was terrorized the family in fear & abuse, but was extremely successful with a very expensive first house, another vacation home, etc. His father wanted him to continue in his (professional) footsteps but he wanted none of it, joined the military for the free education and after getting out went on to become extremely wealthy himself.
Most people who are into airplanes or boats scrounge by considerably to be able to afford one for leisure. Which is evident by the fact that he had to flip his hobby plane to fund a business purchase.
According to his father flipping the plane was only partly connected to funding the mine. He flipped the plane, and was only then offered the mine opportunity. He might have had ample funds for the mine regardless.
Either way, scrounging by to purchase a $300,000 luxury good (today's $ for the sell price of the plane) still qualifies a person as wealthy in my book, especially when taken together with owning the largest home in their area & his father's real estate & consulting business. It still means you had at least $300,000 in disposable income. Just because you choose to spend all of your disposable income on something like that doesn't mean you aren't wealthy.
In today's money it's the equivalent of about $150,000, and funded by selling a plane that sold for twice that amount. I would classify having enough disposable income to own a $300,000 plane & a net worth of a few million to be wealthy.
I should note that my working definition of "wealthy" doesn't mean they never have to work again, or don't have to work to maintain their desired lifestyle. Other people may have different benchmarks. As you said, abstract measures aren't easily quantified, and someone else's benchmark for wealthy may be higher.
While average is more informal, it is the same as the mean, mathematically speaking. Some people may use it, well, informally, to represent other concepts, but the mathematical definition is quite clear.
You’re right, I edited the comment shortly after posting it. Most boomers don’t have 3M in housing. But many do and owning a house on the coast is not considered remarkable.
Imagine arguing that somebody didn’t have financial backing because his dad sold plane and bought emerald mine for half of profit (in country then known for black worker exploitation) for $40.000, and is worth couple millions at best.
This is how every discussion on Errol Musk's wealth goes.
Someone makes an implication that they were fabulously wealthy, using abstract measures like emerald mines, or small planes as a substitute for a concrete measure of wealth.
Someone points out the value of both those things was actually quite low.
Then the goal posts shift to how much more money the Musk family had than the average family, which is true enough.
But they were still decidedly middle class. They all had to work for a living. And in American terms, there are tens of millions of households with similar wealth. Upper middle class, to be sure, but nothing unusual.
And the emerald mine, such as it was, is said to have been in Zambia, not South Africa.
> Then the goal posts shift to how much more money the Musk family had than the average family, which is true enough.
There's hardly a move of goalpost here. People merely argue that showing Elon as self-made "in parent's garage" is bullshit. He had family with capabilities to enable him to participate in ecoms bubble.
> Zambia, not South Africa
"You are wrong, that labour camp wasn't in USSR but in North Korea." I've haven't named the country BTW.
As someone pointed out in another comment, "wealthy" does not mean "never having to work again". My life growing up would have been dramatically different if my parents had been worth even a low amount of millions, and the opportunities available to me would have been drastically higher.
A million dollars in 1970-1980 is worth around 3 to 7 million dollars now. 3 millions in that period is worth at least 10 millions right now. And there is decidedly not tens of millions of households in the US with that networth, let alone a single person.
When we're discussing total net worth, a couple million dollars is decidedly middle class.
In the US, there are 13.6 million households with a net worth over $1 million when excluding their primary residence, out of a total of 126 million households.
Over 10% of households in the US, even when excluding the value of their home, have over a million dollars in assets.
like anyone in developing countries and especially wealthy white South Africans do fit this bill rather well would hoard their actual private wealth in other jurisdictions. just because the company itself is worth nothing on paper doesn't mean they haven't pillaged the country resources for private gain like all the other wanna-be crooks and aspiring kleptocrats. [1][2]
There is a good reason why the family left SA the moment apartheid was abolished and why Elon Musk never went back since the end of apartheid.
Every entitled chuckle-duck born with a silver spoon in their mouth likes to launder their past to make them look self-made. Elon is no different.
Besides that, Elon didn't inherit that wealth. He moved to Canada with little money, worked blue collar jobs and had student debt. That's what he started with. At Zip2 he couldn't afford a second computer.
People WANT to believe a mythology that Elon started off rich to feel better about not accomplishing anything with their own equally or more privileged life. People that started with little themselves don't have this level of cognitive dissonance and see it more as an immigrant success story and inspiration.
He got a $28,000 loan from his father when starting Zip2.
The biggest privilege is having your family's security net, even if you don't use it. Musk has also had luck, being in the right time and place for the dot-com boom. Unlike a lot of people who grew up privileged, he's been a hustler with great business instincts. Unlike a lot of hustlers with great business instincts, he grew up privileged.
I looked for a source other than a tweet from Musk, who like many entrepreneurs is known to stretch the truth. Couldn’t find a definitive source, but it’s mentioned going as far back as the 90s according to Google, with not enough detail to say the exact timing but suggesting that it was crucial at the time. Of course, that’s also a hallmark of startup stories.
The loan came later and he was no more privileged than the average Canadian or American at the time. People who dismiss it as privilege are projecting envy, full stop.
And what are people who feel the need to defend the world’s richest person projecting?
Could the average American in 1995 give a $28,000 loan to his kid? Median net worth was ~$100,000 in today’s dollars. If ‘privilege’ has negative connotations for you, use ‘luck’ instead. I don’t think there’s any question that Musk made some of his own luck through hard work and intelligence, but we often observe the rich with survivorship bias because it would upset the social order if we stopped believing that hard work and intelligence are enough to become rich.
It's well documented that Elon was quite poor as a student in Canada/US.
He left South Africa at 17 with no money to speak of. He's estranged from his father for reasons no one talks about, which makes the father's possible wealth irrelevant.
And yet this "apartheid emerald mine fortune" is such a good story that it will keep being "internet true" forever.
Wikipedia is great for many things, but I would steer clear of it for biographical information of prominent contemporary persons. It's very political and the amount of on-the-fly stealth editing that goes on the site should discredit it. Great for technical information or basic history. Avoid it like the plague anywhere it seeks to weigh in on "the current thing".
When you have to attack Wikipedia as being generically unreliable, instead of presenting some reliable facts and citations about the discussion topic that actually prove your point, you don't have a point.
It has been a long-standing complaint for awhile. In partricular, there appears to be a core group of editors that have displayed a blatant bias against Israel. Huge ommissions of information that only inflame anti-semitic passions and hinder real dialogue from occuring. There are other issues, but this one shows the limitations of wikipedia and how a narrow mindset can comandeer a few pages. Again, I like wikipedia, but it's only reliable for mundane issues.
Also, personal campaigns being carried out to smear people.
Not a good look for a neutral non-partisan outfit. That's why I ignore bios about anyone as a rule on wiki.
Wikipedia is not a reliable source for every info in the world. I hope people realize that. It's funny that some people blindly trust what some unknown party has written on the net on any kind of subject.
Tertiary sources (e.g. encyclopedias) are inherently this way regardless of whether or not it is editable by nearly anyone. One of the strengths in Wikipedia is crowd sourcing and a strong editorial culture that, for example, enforces citing sources and giving unbiased takes, with mechanisms to mark problems with articles rather than deleting them. This ultimately leads to a degree of editorial transparency that is unmet by any other type of source of this kind.
> One of the strengths in Wikipedia is crowd sourcing and a strong editorial culture that, for example, enforces citing sources and giving unbiased takes,
This is a laughable statement. That's assuming the newspapers acting as sources are devoid of bias, while we clearly know that they are partisan in the own right: even stuff that the NYT is heavily biased and can't be seriously used as a reference for everything.
Crowd-sourcing is not a robust mechanism to prevent that from happening either. Just look at every controversial topic on Wikipedia, there is only one narrative that is accepted while the reality might be way more complex that what is portrayed in a paragraph.
Anyone who has tried to insert a true, but counter narrative, fact into a topical article know where the limits of your description are.
For any popular topic, there are self-appointed watchdogs who will revert edits in bad faith and argue with you on the Talk page until you give up and go away. There aren't enough admins to adjudicate all disputes, so what you're reading on a controversial topic is often the product of the most stubborn arguers.
We certainly don't and shouldn't blindly trust you, since all you're doing is attacking Wikipedia's reliability, instead of presenting any reliable facts or evidence or citations about the actual discussion topic himself, Elon Musk. Wikipedia is a hell of a lot more reliable than some random guy on the internet who doesn't have a point or any evidence, and has to resort to generically attacking Wikipedia instead.
Attacking the very idea that it's even possible to know the truth is what you do when the truth isn't on your side.
Well right now the highest value note in south Africa is worth about $13.
I'm sure many HN regulars have homes costing much more than a safe full of $13 notes.
I wouldn't be too confident that "We had so much money at times we couldn't even close our safe." is an amount of money that would actually make someone particularly wealthy by American standards without doing a fair bit of research on what currency that safe would have been full of and how much it had been worth at the time.
There are too many unknowns: the currency, the denominations, the size of the safe. There is little point in speculating whether it was (or was not) a life-changing sum.
Meh, whatever you think of the 'angle' of the NYTimes article, it was pretty clear from talking to his classmates that they were in a very wealthy area of Joberg.. his dad was successful in business (being part owner of at least one mineral mine) and was a local politician.
> Interviews with relatives and former classmates reveal an upbringing in elite, segregated white communities that were littered with anti-Black government propaganda, and detached from the atrocities that white political leaders inflicted on the Black majority.
> Mr. Musk, 50, grew up in the economic hub of Johannesburg, the executive capital of Pretoria and the coastal city of Durban. His suburban communities were largely shrouded in misinformation. Newspapers sometimes arrived on doorsteps with whole sections blacked out, and nightly news bulletins ended with the national anthem and an image of the national flag flapping as the names of white young men who were killed fighting for the government scrolled on the screen.
> “We were really clueless as white South African teenagers. Really clueless,” said Melanie Cheary, a classmate of Mr. Musk’s during the two years he spent at Bryanston High School in the northern suburbs of Johannesburg, where Black people were rarely seen other than in service of white families living in palatial homes.
They go onto say that Musk had black friends and left SA to avoid serving the apartheid government via mandatory military service.
That doesn't mean it was the local equivalent of a $400k home. Local marketplace matters. Near me, within the same 10-mile radius, that house would cost between $800k to $5M depending on the specific location, but I'd say $400k would be the absolute floor on price just about anywhere in the US.
He went from being wealthy growing up, to being very rich after Paypal, to being an extremely rich billionaire, to being the most richest person in the world (maybe ever?). And now a single utterance of his can shape markets or otherwise influence millions of people.
I think it would be difficult to go through the above and not come out the other end without it impacting your behaviors & world view. At a minimum, before he was this wealthy & influential he didn't have as much margin for error. A single bad decision might have tanked Tesla or SpaceX when they were getting started. It would have required Musk to be a lot more careful & deliberate. He also had to care a bit more (or at least pretend to care) about other people's thoughts/ideas etc. These days he can lose $1B in a twitter acquisition breakup fee and it barely matters. And he has enough "f*ck off" money (the amount required to tell someone to "f*ck off" with no significant consequences) to tell anyone to f*ck off. The need to adhere to social niceties is greatly reduced.
This is all on top of the fact that the average person's behavior is usually going to change at least a little as they get older.
All of which is to say that I think there's an excellent chance that he's grown into his current personality. If so, I think it's very possible that it's a mixture: He grew into where he is now, but the seeds were always there & his track in life has amplified or caused those seeds to take hold.