The value in the Quora post comes from the perspective provided by Justine Musk's response, having been married to the obsession needed to attempt to achieve this. You're right! You'll likely still fail, but that's what it takes to try: obsession. The potential wealth is a byproduct.
Having a diamond mine owning dad (Musk), a 250K loan from your parents (Bezos), a businesswoman mother with connections to IBM leadership (Gates), a half-billionaire real estate mogul father (Trump), financial support from friends and family to the tune of $1 million (Thiel), an $100K cheque from your father (Zuckerberg), and so on, doesn't hurt either.
Or a stable middle and above class family background, with the support to study, preferably at an elite university.
Or family connections.
Or a safety net in general.
Or being at the right place, at the right time (like at the early eighties PC boom, or at the late 90s web boom), and at the right country too (not many opportunities if you're born in a family in Lagos).
Or the ability to treat people as a means to an end, and lie, cheat, backstab, and take advantage of them as needed to get ahead. Including the ability to turn a blind eye to shady things you caused or implicitly ordered but don't need to know the details of.
Idk why this keeps getting repeated as significant. It wasn't even diamonds, illustrating how bad the telephone game is here.
'Musk’s father Errol ran a successful engineering company in Pretoria, South Africa.
Some writers have made much of him “owning an emerald mine”. But the mine only cost $50,000, never really produced many emeralds, and closed after a few years - it was a side investment unrelated to the family’s wealth. Rumors that it used “apartheid labor” or produced “blood emeralds” are false: the mine was in Zambia, which had no apartheid or bloody conflicts.
Musk claims to be self-made; he moved to Canada at age 17 with $2500 and worked his way up from there. For a while he supported himself by cutting logs, Abe Lincoln style. Nobody paid for his college and he took out $100,000 in debt. Musk’s father invested $28,000 in his first company, but Musk dismissed this as a “later round” and claimed he was already successful at that point and would have gotten the money anyway. The total for that round was $200,000, so Musk’s father’s contribution was only about 15%.'
>Some writers have made much of him “owning an emerald mine”. But the mine only cost $50,000, never really produced many emeralds, and closed after a few years - it was a side investment unrelated to the family’s wealth. Rumors that it used “apartheid labor” or produced “blood emeralds” are false: the mine was in Zambia, which had no apartheid or bloody conflicts.
Even if that was the case, it would still be the 'casual' $50K side-business emerald mine purchase of a multi-millionaire dad (don't we all have a $50 emerald mine?). Very humble upbringing wise.
But it's not the case. Musk has said it doesn't exist [1], after first saying back in the day that it did exist [2].
That "claims it produced “blood emeralds” are false: the mine was in Zambia, which had no apartheid or bloody conflicts" is also BS for people knowing the situation on the ground in such developing African countries, especially back in the day.
But here it is from Musk's father: "Elon knows it's true. All the kids know about it." "Elon saw them (the emeralds) at our house," he added. "He knew I was selling them." (...) "What Elon is saying is that there was no formal mine. It was a rock formation protruding from the ground in the middle of nowhere," Errol told the tabloid, noting that he kept his involvement with the operation "under the table." "There was no mining company. There are no signed agreements or financial statements," he explained. "No one owned anything. The deal was done on a handshake with the Italian man at a time when Zambia was a free for all."
And here's from Elon himself in Forbes interview:
"(...) my father also had a share in an Emerald mine in Zambia. I was 15 and really wanted to go with him but didn’t realize how dangerous it was. I couldn’t find my passport so I ended up grabbing my brother’s – which turned out to be six months overdue! So we had this planeload of contraband and an overdue passport from another person. There were AK-47s all over the place and I’m thinking, “Man, this could really go bad.”
If it indeed "only cost $50K", it was because it was a hush-hush deal, stealing Zambian resources from some foreigner sleazeballs who grabbed them. "AK-47s all over the place" and a handshake hush deal "at a time when Zambia was a free for all" does sound awful like blood diamonds, sorry, blood emeralds.
As for never "really producing many emeralds", the whole narrative adding that goes like a Bart Simpson excuse: "the mine never existed, and if it did it was bought cheap, and if it wasn't bought cheap in didn't produce any emeralds anyway, and even if it did produce some, Elon never got money from those"
According to his father, he quite did: ""During that time," said Errol, speaking to Elon's college years, "I managed to send money I made from emerald sales to him and [Elon's brother, Kimbal Musk] for living expenses."
Rather, people should not believe the self-mythologizing narratives of billionaire CEOs past, especially when they involve their self-made quality. Including in biographies and biopics.
First you falsely claim its diamonds. Then you quote
> Musk has said it doesn't exist [1],
when it's clearly Elon saying he has never owned an emerald mine, not about his dad.
The rest of your claims are unverifiable conjecture with a reasonable assumption of inaccuracy based on your past false claims.
His dad isn't the most reliable witness anymore, you can be the judge of that through his words:
"In the email, Errol went on a rant and called Joe Biden a 'freak, criminal and pedophile President,' and in South Africa, with no whites around the 'blacks will go back to the trees.'
He added that Russian President Vladimir Putin was the 'only world leader talking' and included a graphic of a stadium scoreboard which read: 'TRUMP WON - F** Joe Biden.'"
> Bart Simpson excuse: "the mine never existed, and if it did it was bought cheap, and if it wasn't bought cheap in didn't produce any emeralds anyway, and even if it did produce some, Elon never got money from those"
This wasn't some fallback excuse that kept being proven wrong. No one disputed the dad's mine existing, it was always claimed cheap and didn't produce much, and Elon got some 5 figure help from his wealthy dad that doesn't have anything to do with emerald mines, because his dad ran an engineering company.
Yeah, a remembered the kind of gem wrong. It's emeralds. I am not a rare gem afficionado, couldn't tell an emerald for a ruby (I believe the former is green, or is that jade?). Same difference.
>when it's clearly Elon saying he has never owned an emerald mine, not about his dad.
Is that so? Here's Elon: "Regarding the so-called “emerald mine”, there is no objective evidence whatsoever that this mine ever existed. He told me that he owned a share in a mine in Zambia, and I believed him for a while, but nobody has ever seen the mine, nor are there any records of its existence" [1].
Anything else?
>His dad isn't the most reliable witness anymore, you can be the judge of that through his words
His dad is not "the most reliable witness" on his own ex property because he has political views on US politics and world leaders one doesn't like? That's your argument? (since you point to his opinion on Joe Biden and Putin, and tell us to judge how reliable he is as a witness based on that).
And the reliable witness is Elon (because he doesn't have non-likable political views)? And who also in the Forbes interview said that not only that his father did have the mine, but he had visited it as well?
Not to mention you yourself not only accepted it as existing, but even mentioned how must it was bought for.
>The rest of your claims are unverifiable conjecture with a reasonable assumption of inaccuracy based on your past false claims.
You need the right obsession's at the right time. Markets change. I doubt many dot com millionaires would have the same success with the web if they'd been born today regardless of their enthusiasm for the technology.
No (almost certainly), but you will become frustrated and exhausted. You will probably destroy your relationships with the people who should be closest to you by chasing this obsession. You will be so busy chasing money that you miss out on living.
I don't know if determination and hard work are all that is required to be a billionaire, but I do know for sure that laziness, sloth, and sitting around will never make one a billionaire.
>> I do know for sure that laziness, sloth, and sitting around will never make one a billionaire.
It can actually, consider a multi-millionaire who becomes a billionaire due to finding a lucky stock pick. People tend to perceive wealth as equated to hard work, but the reality is it's luck. Just as we perceive ill-fortune as random, so is extreme wealth. It's because that most people really want money to equate to success.
None of those are loop holes in the system, just gaps in the market. A loophole implies bypassing existing laws or regulations.
I suppose you could make an pretty compelling argument that ride-sharing like Uber and Lift are a loophole around the regulations of taxies. Same with Airbnb. But not sure if those made anyone a billionaire. Multi millionaire for sure, but I don't think a billionaire.
You actually gave a perfect example. Airbnb made it possible to create unregulated hotels across the world, and Airbnb got a cut of every booking. Brian Chesky, one of the founders, is worth almost $10 billion.
> One of the many qualities that separate self-made billionaires from the rest of us is their ability to ask the right questions.
I posit that there is no such thing as a self-made billionaire.
I believe that every single billionaire has had massive amounts of financial assistance.
I'd love to see a single counter-example to this statement.
Your statement is true, for some definitions of "massive" and "financial assistance". We all Live In A Society, after all, and nobody exists in a vacuum, let alone build a billion-dollar enterprise in a vacuum. The first step is having other people pay you for products and services!
So, if we can agree that merely having gone to public school and driven on public highways is not "massive financial assistance", whereas having received a billion-dollar inheritance is definitely "massive financial assistance", where does the line fall, under which you can be considered self-made?
Taking a stab at a reasonable definition for me, if you receive resources X or less as financial or in-kind assistance, and you go from X to 100X through regular market transactions, you can say you're a self-made 100Xaire. 10X seems too liberal (after all, someone could have just invested the X at birth in an index fund and waited 40 years and be at 10X), while 1000x seems too restrictive (if you start out with $10k and end up with $5M, I think it's still fair to say you're a self made millionaire). It's probably not a truly linear relationship, though (it's easier to go from $10M to $100M than $10k to $100k).
This is probably a broader definition than the original comment's. I suspect there the core issue is questioning whether it makes sense to even differentiate a billionaire who's self-made vs one who's not. I find that a useful distinction to make in many contexts, though.
I'll go a step further and say there is no self made anything. Just by being born in America you have a huge advantage over someone born in say, Ethiopia. When I hear someone call themselves "self-made", I immediately assume that person does not value the support and love given by those close to them. It also means they very likely don't value how much society in general contributes to the life they live. In other words, if someone tells me they are "self-made" - I'd say there's a very strong chance they are either out of touch, ungrateful, or even narcissistic.
This seems like an unnecessarily uncharitable view. Plenty of people are given support and love by those close to them. The overwhelming majority of such people do not become billionaires, or even millionaires. And at least in America, people who became wealthy generally did so by providing goods or services to others who voluntarily purchased those goods and services.
I think "self-made" is a shorthand for: the person didn't inherit the money, and engaged in entrepreneurial activity from which the majority of their wealth is derived. Of course there is an element of luck and being in the right place at the right time, and we certainly don't need to deify those people, but to say that "there is no self made anything" seems, I dunno, fatalistic.
I’d argue wealth is often created by accident. How much wealth did the creation of penicillin create?
If anything, we aren’t being cynical enough towards the concept of “self-made”. Every single genius recognizes that they are standing on the shoulder of giants; would Einstein be possible if he had to invent Newton or the concept of 0 from scratch?
It also helps to remember that many people are working towards the same main ideas at any one time. If the Wright brothers didn’t invent the first plane, many other groups were right behind. Facebook could have failed and a dozen social networks taken its place. There were dozens of competitors to the Apple I and Apple II. We’d still have Windows-like operating systems if Microsoft failed. There were many scrapped covid vaccines that could have stepped up if Pzfier and Moderna failed.
For the person who captures the market and the wealth generated, it doesn’t mean they didn’t put in any work- but they certainly owe their success more to luck and their environment than their own effort. Again, none of the above could have happened in Ethiopia.
Literally the only example of a (maybe) self-made billionaire I can think of is Rihanna. Possibly confounded by the fact that she was a successful musician long before she was a billionaire, which obviously brings a lot of leverage with it, although IIRC she did get into her music career fair and square (grew up in Barbados with no special connections, no rich family to buy her a spot on a label, etc.).
So that's... one. Maybe. Struggling to think of even a single additional example.
Debatable, but a good answer. "Umbrella" I think is considered the song that elevated her, but that was written by another group of artists that had originally considered it for Britney Spears. Interesting history.
> In the studio, Stewart was "messing around with a walloping hi-hat sound", which he found in the free music software GarageBand, which is included in all Mac computers.
Just if anyone didn't notice the top reply is from Elon's ex-wife Justine Musk, and here response is point on.
You become a billionaire by accumulating wealth. What is wealth? Wealth is something that other people want! It could be cars, gold, influence, a piece of software that saves people time.
She is fundamentally correct.
Elon became a millionaire by helping build a product that solved a problem many people had (how to pay each other on Ebay)
Then he became a billionaire by strategically gambling his millions buildin products that people absolutely needed: low cost reusable rocketry, affordable electric vehicles, and right now, global low latency satellite internet.
The power of wealth is evident when you build a product where even people that justifiably dislike you (for being a douchebag and spouting Russian propaganda) need to use your product regardless (Starlink)
43 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 101 ms ] threadHaving a diamond mine owning dad (Musk), a 250K loan from your parents (Bezos), a businesswoman mother with connections to IBM leadership (Gates), a half-billionaire real estate mogul father (Trump), financial support from friends and family to the tune of $1 million (Thiel), an $100K cheque from your father (Zuckerberg), and so on, doesn't hurt either.
Or a stable middle and above class family background, with the support to study, preferably at an elite university.
Or family connections.
Or a safety net in general.
Or being at the right place, at the right time (like at the early eighties PC boom, or at the late 90s web boom), and at the right country too (not many opportunities if you're born in a family in Lagos).
Or the ability to treat people as a means to an end, and lie, cheat, backstab, and take advantage of them as needed to get ahead. Including the ability to turn a blind eye to shady things you caused or implicitly ordered but don't need to know the details of.
Hard work makes you a magnitude more lucky.
everything and everyone else is just peanut-butthurt and jelly.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37419334
Idk why this keeps getting repeated as significant. It wasn't even diamonds, illustrating how bad the telephone game is here.
'Musk’s father Errol ran a successful engineering company in Pretoria, South Africa.
Some writers have made much of him “owning an emerald mine”. But the mine only cost $50,000, never really produced many emeralds, and closed after a few years - it was a side investment unrelated to the family’s wealth. Rumors that it used “apartheid labor” or produced “blood emeralds” are false: the mine was in Zambia, which had no apartheid or bloody conflicts.
Musk claims to be self-made; he moved to Canada at age 17 with $2500 and worked his way up from there. For a while he supported himself by cutting logs, Abe Lincoln style. Nobody paid for his college and he took out $100,000 in debt. Musk’s father invested $28,000 in his first company, but Musk dismissed this as a “later round” and claimed he was already successful at that point and would have gotten the money anyway. The total for that round was $200,000, so Musk’s father’s contribution was only about 15%.'
People should read https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-elon-musk
Even if that was the case, it would still be the 'casual' $50K side-business emerald mine purchase of a multi-millionaire dad (don't we all have a $50 emerald mine?). Very humble upbringing wise.
But it's not the case. Musk has said it doesn't exist [1], after first saying back in the day that it did exist [2].
That "claims it produced “blood emeralds” are false: the mine was in Zambia, which had no apartheid or bloody conflicts" is also BS for people knowing the situation on the ground in such developing African countries, especially back in the day.
But here it is from Musk's father: "Elon knows it's true. All the kids know about it." "Elon saw them (the emeralds) at our house," he added. "He knew I was selling them." (...) "What Elon is saying is that there was no formal mine. It was a rock formation protruding from the ground in the middle of nowhere," Errol told the tabloid, noting that he kept his involvement with the operation "under the table." "There was no mining company. There are no signed agreements or financial statements," he explained. "No one owned anything. The deal was done on a handshake with the Italian man at a time when Zambia was a free for all."
And here's from Elon himself in Forbes interview:
"(...) my father also had a share in an Emerald mine in Zambia. I was 15 and really wanted to go with him but didn’t realize how dangerous it was. I couldn’t find my passport so I ended up grabbing my brother’s – which turned out to be six months overdue! So we had this planeload of contraband and an overdue passport from another person. There were AK-47s all over the place and I’m thinking, “Man, this could really go bad.”
If it indeed "only cost $50K", it was because it was a hush-hush deal, stealing Zambian resources from some foreigner sleazeballs who grabbed them. "AK-47s all over the place" and a handshake hush deal "at a time when Zambia was a free for all" does sound awful like blood diamonds, sorry, blood emeralds.
As for never "really producing many emeralds", the whole narrative adding that goes like a Bart Simpson excuse: "the mine never existed, and if it did it was bought cheap, and if it wasn't bought cheap in didn't produce any emeralds anyway, and even if it did produce some, Elon never got money from those"
According to his father, he quite did: ""During that time," said Errol, speaking to Elon's college years, "I managed to send money I made from emerald sales to him and [Elon's brother, Kimbal Musk] for living expenses."
Rather, people should not believe the self-mythologizing narratives of billionaire CEOs past, especially when they involve their self-made quality. Including in biographies and biopics.
[1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1646272562488569857
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20140729222547/http://www.forbes...
> Musk has said it doesn't exist [1],
when it's clearly Elon saying he has never owned an emerald mine, not about his dad.
The rest of your claims are unverifiable conjecture with a reasonable assumption of inaccuracy based on your past false claims.
His dad isn't the most reliable witness anymore, you can be the judge of that through his words:
"In the email, Errol went on a rant and called Joe Biden a 'freak, criminal and pedophile President,' and in South Africa, with no whites around the 'blacks will go back to the trees.'
He added that Russian President Vladimir Putin was the 'only world leader talking' and included a graphic of a stadium scoreboard which read: 'TRUMP WON - F** Joe Biden.'"
> Bart Simpson excuse: "the mine never existed, and if it did it was bought cheap, and if it wasn't bought cheap in didn't produce any emeralds anyway, and even if it did produce some, Elon never got money from those"
This wasn't some fallback excuse that kept being proven wrong. No one disputed the dad's mine existing, it was always claimed cheap and didn't produce much, and Elon got some 5 figure help from his wealthy dad that doesn't have anything to do with emerald mines, because his dad ran an engineering company.
Yeah, a remembered the kind of gem wrong. It's emeralds. I am not a rare gem afficionado, couldn't tell an emerald for a ruby (I believe the former is green, or is that jade?). Same difference.
>when it's clearly Elon saying he has never owned an emerald mine, not about his dad.
Is that so? Here's Elon: "Regarding the so-called “emerald mine”, there is no objective evidence whatsoever that this mine ever existed. He told me that he owned a share in a mine in Zambia, and I believed him for a while, but nobody has ever seen the mine, nor are there any records of its existence" [1].
Anything else?
>His dad isn't the most reliable witness anymore, you can be the judge of that through his words
His dad is not "the most reliable witness" on his own ex property because he has political views on US politics and world leaders one doesn't like? That's your argument? (since you point to his opinion on Joe Biden and Putin, and tell us to judge how reliable he is as a witness based on that).
And the reliable witness is Elon (because he doesn't have non-likable political views)? And who also in the Forbes interview said that not only that his father did have the mine, but he had visited it as well?
Not to mention you yourself not only accepted it as existing, but even mentioned how must it was bought for.
>The rest of your claims are unverifiable conjecture with a reasonable assumption of inaccuracy based on your past false claims.
Oh, the irony...
[1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1654971702571331584?ref_...
It can actually, consider a multi-millionaire who becomes a billionaire due to finding a lucky stock pick. People tend to perceive wealth as equated to hard work, but the reality is it's luck. Just as we perceive ill-fortune as random, so is extreme wealth. It's because that most people really want money to equate to success.
Once the loophole is closed, your hack will be grandfathered in, creating an automatic moat.
I suppose you could make an pretty compelling argument that ride-sharing like Uber and Lift are a loophole around the regulations of taxies. Same with Airbnb. But not sure if those made anyone a billionaire. Multi millionaire for sure, but I don't think a billionaire.
https://www.forbes.com/profile/brian-chesky/?sh=34a2068944d3
I posit that there is no such thing as a self-made billionaire. I believe that every single billionaire has had massive amounts of financial assistance. I'd love to see a single counter-example to this statement.
Howard Schultz, Larry Ellison, Oprah, George Soros all have reasonable claims to being self-made, though of course they all received support at times.
So, if we can agree that merely having gone to public school and driven on public highways is not "massive financial assistance", whereas having received a billion-dollar inheritance is definitely "massive financial assistance", where does the line fall, under which you can be considered self-made?
This is probably a broader definition than the original comment's. I suspect there the core issue is questioning whether it makes sense to even differentiate a billionaire who's self-made vs one who's not. I find that a useful distinction to make in many contexts, though.
I think "self-made" is a shorthand for: the person didn't inherit the money, and engaged in entrepreneurial activity from which the majority of their wealth is derived. Of course there is an element of luck and being in the right place at the right time, and we certainly don't need to deify those people, but to say that "there is no self made anything" seems, I dunno, fatalistic.
Wealth isn't created by accident.
If anything, we aren’t being cynical enough towards the concept of “self-made”. Every single genius recognizes that they are standing on the shoulder of giants; would Einstein be possible if he had to invent Newton or the concept of 0 from scratch?
It also helps to remember that many people are working towards the same main ideas at any one time. If the Wright brothers didn’t invent the first plane, many other groups were right behind. Facebook could have failed and a dozen social networks taken its place. There were dozens of competitors to the Apple I and Apple II. We’d still have Windows-like operating systems if Microsoft failed. There were many scrapped covid vaccines that could have stepped up if Pzfier and Moderna failed.
For the person who captures the market and the wealth generated, it doesn’t mean they didn’t put in any work- but they certainly owe their success more to luck and their environment than their own effort. Again, none of the above could have happened in Ethiopia.
So that's... one. Maybe. Struggling to think of even a single additional example.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umbrella_(song)
> In the studio, Stewart was "messing around with a walloping hi-hat sound", which he found in the free music software GarageBand, which is included in all Mac computers.
You become a billionaire by accumulating wealth. What is wealth? Wealth is something that other people want! It could be cars, gold, influence, a piece of software that saves people time.
She is fundamentally correct.
Elon became a millionaire by helping build a product that solved a problem many people had (how to pay each other on Ebay)
Then he became a billionaire by strategically gambling his millions buildin products that people absolutely needed: low cost reusable rocketry, affordable electric vehicles, and right now, global low latency satellite internet.
The power of wealth is evident when you build a product where even people that justifiably dislike you (for being a douchebag and spouting Russian propaganda) need to use your product regardless (Starlink)