Elon Musk's True Origins: Is He a Rich Second Generation from an Emerald Mine or Did He Build Himself from Scratch?

Recently, a piece of gossip has surfaced online regarding whether Elon Musk was wealthy in his childhood, and the two differing opinions almost led to a fight.

Father's Version: The family has so much money that we can't close the safe.

Elon Musk's father, Errol, once talked about a “famous scene”: back in the day, the family had a Zambian emerald mine, and how much money did they have? The safe couldn't even close. He said the young Musk would carry emeralds to sell on Fifth Avenue in New York, and once he casually sold two emeralds at Tiffany's for 2000 bucks, and later, they set one of them into a ring and sold it for 24000 bucks.

Sounds like a perfect rich second generation script.

Musk's Version: This Mine Doesn't Exist

But in 2022, Musk himself tweeted to contradict this: he inherited no wealth at all and received no large donations. What about that “emerald mine”? “There is no objective evidence that it ever existed. My dad said he had shares in a mine in Zambia, I believed him at the time, but later no one has seen it, and there are no records to be found.”

His statement is: the family is actually at a middle to upper-middle class level, and his father's engineering business later declined. In the end, it was he and his brother who had to support their father.

Current Situation

Ironically, the billionaire Musk, worth hundreds of billions today, is indeed supporting his father—but with one condition: no shenanigans.

Which version is right or wrong? Netizens are still debating this. But from the results, regardless of his background, this guy still managed to make it on his own.