How much money did Elon Musk have to start his business

Like everybody else who has answered you, I don’t know much money Elon Musk has inherited, besides the $28,000 he and his brother used his father’s money to start their first internet business (the equivalent of $47,500 today).

But rather than listing anecdotes about his scrappiness that he’s managed to turn into part of his legend, I will mention a really obvious fact that all of these answerers leave out: His family was rich. Not just upper middle class, but rich (either upper class or in the higher echelons of the upper middle class). His father owned half of an emerald mine in Zambia. He says he paid 80,000 British pounds for it in the mid-1980s, the equivalent of about $275,000 USD today. The mine may not have been the main source of their wealth, but citing it is the best way to make it clear that this was not a family of normal means. To throw $275,000 at such a risky venture indicates that Musk’s father had other assets or savings.

If you’ve ever met somebody whose parents have savings in the millions, it’s probably hard for you to imagine them getting “nothing” from their parents like everybody here describes. Rich people get help all along the way, from birth to well into adulthood.

The idea that a rich person can build a legend around themselves of being poor and scrappy simply by moving to a different country as a teenager and bragging about taking odd jobs is absurd. His father had so much money that it was leaking out everywhere (they literally couldn’t fit it all in their safe, according to one interview with his father about a family visit to New York City).

I can say with virtual certainty that Elon and his brother had access, in some form, to money while they were on their adventure in North America. It’s not surprising that Musk has done his best to pretend he didn’t have huge advantages in life, particularly because that money came in part from a white-owned colonial emerald mine in Africa. It’s much worse looking than simply having a dad who’s a dentist or something.

Musk’s claims about six-figure college debt, odd jobs, no place to live, etc. are the kinds of anecdotes that rich people like to point to in order to obscure their actual financial situations.

Really, if you think about it, rich people are perfectly positioned to do all of these things with no real consequences. If you’re rich, why do you care about taking on six figures of debt to go to college, or moving to a new city without arranging housing? These are clearly temporary situations for you and won’t have long term consequences like they would for somebody with no family money.

I would link to more sources, but just Google “Musk emerald mine” and you’ll see plenty of news articles about his family’s wealth.

7/7/20 Update: I’ve seen more anecdotes from Musk and his mother about how little money they had when Musk was around college age and in his 20s, with the strong implication being that Musk’s father either didn’t have much money by then, or that Musk’s mother was not receiving significant alimony and child support. I’ve also seen that Musk denies getting pre-seed money from his father, saying that his father invested 10% of a $200,000 seed round that included investments from other angel investors, after some traction had already been achieved.

I honestly don’t know how much financial support Musk had when he started his first business. I still don’t trust his anecdotes, because the “self-made” myth is important for his personality cult, but my answer is that I really don’t know how much financial support he had.

Even if he didn’t have direct financial security and support when he moved to Canada at 16, he at least came from an upper middle class family with a lot of hard-to-quantify cultural advantages, including family connections like Greg Kouri, but I will allow that it’s possible that he wasn’t financially comfortable after leaving South Africa and did not have a financial cushion he could lean on when taking out loans for school and starting his first business. If that’s the case, he may have been born luckier than 90-99% of people in developed countries, but not really any luckier than most successful tech founders.