Serial entrepreneur, founder of multiple multi-billion dollar companies — the CEO of Tesla, SpaceX, and Twitter Elon Musk opened up more about his personal life yesterday.
He wrote a long tweet to clarify the confusion surrounding his teenage life, early career, and inheritance from his family — especially his father’s emerald mines.
Just recently, some of the mainstream media outlets published stories of how Elon Musk thrived so much inheriting a fortune mainly from the emerald mine his father owned in the past.
“I grew up in a lower, transitioning to upper, middle income situation, but did not have a happy childhood. Haven’t inherited anything ever from anyone, nor has anyone given me a large financial gift,” Elon Musk started the tweet with this paragraph.
Elon Musk outright denied getting any financial assistance to build his business empire in the United States.
The rumors of Elon Musk inheriting a fortune from his father’s “apartheid emerald mine” or “slave emerald mine are not new. These rumors first started appearing on social media back in 2013 and Musk has denied these rumors in the past as well. But this time, he went into a bit of detail.
For example in the following tweet from Dec 2019, Elon Musk said that he ended up in a ~$100k student loan despite working through college. He couldn’t even afford a 2nd computer at his company Zip2.
The emerald mine rumors once again started picking up pace after Elon’s father Errol Musk gave an interview to The Sun last month. Errol said that he actually owned an emerald mine in Zambia (near Lake Tanganyika).
Elon Musk’s father even went on to say that his son knew about the mine when the family lived together in South Africa. And precious stones kept coming to them from time to time and Elon Musk’s sister even owned some of them.
Errol says that he used the money from his emerald mine to send his sons Elon and Kimbal Musk to North America. Though he admitted that this emerald mine was kind of a protruded rock, not an actual mine (the story he told The Sun is highly interesting but hard to swallow at the same time).
Elon Musk had to compose a long story responding to this emerald mine rumor because a Community Note on Twitter tagged a mainstream news story as a source of confirmation of this gossip. At the request of the community, this note was later on removed from the social media platform.
Here’s the complete post in Elon Musk’s words:
I grew up in a lower, transitioning to upper, middle income situation, but did not have a happy childhood. Haven’t inherited anything ever from anyone, nor has anyone given me a large financial gift.
My father created a small electrical/mechanical engineering company that was successful for 20 to 30 years, but it fell on hard times. He has been essentially bankrupt for about 25 years, requiring financial support from my brother and me.
That said, he does deserve credit for teaching me the fundamentals of physics, engineering and construction, which is more valuable than money, but did not support me financially after high school in any meaningful way.
Our condition of providing him financial support was that he not engage in bad behavior. Unfortunately, he nonetheless did. There are young children involved, so we continued to provide financial support for their well-being.
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.
If this mine was real, he would not require financial support from my brother and me.
Elon Musk posted via Twitter.
Elon Musk’s mother Maye Musk also commented on his tweet and said the family moved to Toronto in 1989 in a one-bedroom apartment. The family later on moved to another apartment and that she never heard of an emerald mine until the rumors started on Twitter about 10 years ago.
“I only briefly lived with my Mom tbc [to be clear] lol,” Elon Musk stated in a reply to his mother’s above tweet.
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