call a spade a spade: this is a last-ditch effort coming about six months too late.
In the seven months since Musk bought the company he singlehandedly fired nearly every employee, accidentally locked the remainder out of the headquarters, turned blue-check validation into a living nightmare for international brands, un-banned some of the most notorious and repugnant users from white nationalists to bigots and racists, mis-branded news outlets as state-sponsored, threatened to open a news agency to impersonation on his platform, cancelled most of the API, and tried to extort the very brands his platform depended on in a cash-for-validation scheme that backfired spectacularly.
This is 44bn of musks backing investors finally waking up to the fact that the willy-wonka they trusted to shepherd a communications platform was in fact just a billionaire heir to an emerald mine on track to grift them out of their dosh for his own petty feud with 'the libs.' Frankly its astounding theyre permitting musk to continue to do anything at all, albeit i suspect his new r&d role is about as authentic as his college credentials.
The "Elon had it easy because he had a fortune from emerald mining" is total bollocks. He was certainly not "rich" when he came to US and was in university here, and when he badly needed money at the beginning of Tesla and SpaceX there was certainly no secret backup of "Emerald Mine" money.
I'm not sure where this rubbish conspiracy came from but if there was Emerald Mine money there wasn't much of it. You may not like to hear it, but Elon's big start came from the success of X and Paypal which then bankrolled the beginnings of SpaceX and Tesla, it wasn't from a rich daddy.
You're correct that Musk isn't a "billionaire heir to an emerald mine" but his own father has said the emerald mine was real and that it helped pay Musk's living expenses at college:
> Errol went as far as to say that emerald money paid for his son's move to the US, where Elon would go on to attend the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton Business School on scholarship — with, apparently, emerald-generated cash in his pocket for living expenses.
> when he badly needed money at the beginning of Tesla and SpaceX there was certainly no secret backup of "Emerald Mine" money
That's not personal wealth, that's company investment. Just because you (or your family) doesn't have spare money kicking around to finance a space rocket company doesn't mean that you're not personally rich and able to pay for things "regular" folks cannot and have connections they don't.
This says that Errol claims he managed to give his two sons about $115k in total. Which makes sense given he got his Emerald mine share for less than that.
There's also literally zero evidence that Errol had any useful connections here.
It really irritates me how many myths float around because people cannot be bothered to go find the original sources...
My dad worked in the non-profit world making federal senior executive salary, and my mom made over $100k/year as a retail salesperson in a furniture store. My parents managed to pay about $300k in college tuition between me and my brother.
I’d never claim to be anything other than upper middle class (even though my dad grew up in a village in Bangladesh and his elementary school had no walls). But at the same time, if I became a billionaire it would be extremely disingenuous to imply that it was the result of family wealth. This level of family wealth is mundane in top American schools. The journalists whining about Musk almost certainly had similar support from their parents.
If you look at inflation calculator 115K in 1997 is worth 290K today. I don't know a single parent that would or could hand over that amount of cash in 97 or today. It's wealthly regardless of how you slice it.
It's definitely closer to "doctor married a lawyer" levels of money than "single mother barista" levels of money, but "wealthy" normally implies enough money to live comfortably without working, not upper middle class.
For context, a doctor and lawyer family in a state capital will earn $2-3m per decade, which is MUCH more than any reasonable estimates of the Musk family's wealth or income.
I earn 2-3M per decade not including investments or IPO. I've sent multiple children to a University. Giving my children 60K-290K in cash while they were studying is not something that crossed my mind once. In fact I would argue you're supposed to struggle a little bit in college.
According to Elon's dad, he was rich:
‘I drove them to school in a convertible Rolls-Royce Corniche, they had thoroughbred horses to ride and motorbikes at the age of 14. They were spoilt, I suppose. Maybe that’s why Elon is acting like a spoilt child now,’.
Here's a video of Elon back in the day on CNN talking about sleeping on the floor and buying his first expensive car with the money he was making from x.com and Justine Musk saying she fears they will become spoiled brats:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9mczdODqzo
I think that people get too visceral on this topic.
Elon has obviously managed to create incredibly successful businesses. And he is also from an upper class background, which makes things easier, but hey, doesn't mean he isn't talented and that he worked really hard to get where he is.
Another thing that also seems pretty obvious is that he wants to hide his privileged background. Here is an archived interview from Forbes where he openly talks about his father's private plane and the emerald mine:
toronto had widespread rent control since 1975 without means testing so what this really means is that they rented in toronto. wow, we are just beginning to peel back the layers on this!
I was always confused because it seemed like his dad bought a handful of shares in a mining company and people think this means he owns it? Like if I went and bought 10 shares of Apple suddenly Tim Cook is answering to me? Elon seems to have had a nice upper-middle class/lower end rich childhood, but from what I've been able to discover he's not some trust fund baby. He wasn't the money guy at Paypal I don't think, but he did manage to turn his Paypal money into successful car and rocket companies.
You might be rich if you funded the 529 plan with proceeds from your emerald mine. Outside of that scenario, your kids' 529 plan doesn't really have anything to do with this.
Someone with an ownership stake in a mine that produces material with a variety of industrial and commercial uses is not necessarily rich. But that person is in a relatively tiny group compared to the group containing all parents who are able to contribute to their children's educational expenses. And the "owns <part of> a mine" group's average net worth is probably a fair bit higher than that of the "can contribute to the kid's college" group.
Hence, if you own an emerald mine, you might be rich.
And if you own a failed emerald mine you might be poor. If you own an emerald mine that just barely broke even (admittedly that is a bit unlikely), you might end up middle class in the end. Of course you can also end up being obscenely wealthy from such a venture.
I don't think anyone is suggesting elon musk rose from being a homeless person to a billionaire. I guess this internet dispute is whether he made his own money, or inherieted it (e.g. like trump). Whether or not his parents owned an emerald mine doesn't really shed much light on that debate. Its entirely possible they were moderately wealthy but the emerald mine wasn't super lucrative and musk still made money mostly by means of his own combination of skill and luck.
"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." - Elon Musk, https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1654971702571331584
This thread is a good example of how silly the debate has gotten.
"You're trying to tell me Musk's family is rich? He couldn't even pay for SpaceX himself, how could he be rich?!"
"I've put away some cash for my child to go to college, are you saying I'm as rich as Elon Musk?!"
It's all just so ridiculous. A lot of people here seem convinced that there are only two arguments to be made: that Musk is a spoiled trust fund baby that deserves no credit for everything, or that Musk was a hard-scrabble self-starter that did everything on his own. Maybe, just maybe the truth is somewhere in the middle?
IIRC the claim is that Musk’s dad’s share was worth 50 grand USD when he bought it. There are individual emeralds worth that much. It likely wasn’t much of a mine if it did exist. A tiny artisanal mine.
I think the point is the only evidence that you provided for the argument that “Musk got his wealth from his family’s emerald mine” is that his parents paid for his college expenses. And that is, in my and many others minds, is a pathetically weak argument.
Full disclosure - my parents paid for a lot of my college expenses. At least half of the people who go to Ivy leagues have parents that will pay for their college expenses. It’s almost entirely, if not completely irrelevant to his work at PayPal, the founding of SpaceX, and the building of Tesla.
So it’s baffling (to me, at least) that it keeps getting brought up as a reason to hate Elon Musk. It feels that people want to find reasons to deeply hate this person, and they through anything they possibly can against him, nonsensical or not.
> I think the point is the only evidence that you provided for the argument that “Musk got his wealth from his family’s emerald mine”
But at no point was I making that argument. The OP suggested (as Musk has many times) that the mine literally didn't exist. I was simply pointing out that according to his father it very much did exist and paid for Elon's college.
I'm not arguing in bad faith. I'm making specific points that, for reasons unknown, @deelowe and yourself are making a wider inference from.
The post I replied to said:
> I'm not sure where this rubbish conspiracy came from but if there was Emerald Mine money there wasn't much of it.
My reply clarified that there was indeed an emerald mine (according to Musk's father) and that it paid for his college living expenses. I then went on to say that an inability to pay for SpaceX does not mean you are "not rich".
> you're either suggesting that @deelowe has family wealth or you're arguing in bad faith.
But that's silly too. With no numbers attached "family wealth" doesn't mean anything. Almost all families have "family wealth", if anything the bad faith argument here is trying to suggest that all wealth is somehow equal.
You'll note in my original reply I didn't even say that Elon's family was inordinately wealthy, just that the mine was real and that it paid for his college. Any "bad faith" on top of that is your own interpretation, not my words.
I don't know what 529 you guys invested in but Utah's 529 which anyone can use whether or not they live in Utah allows you to invest in regular old Vanguard funds like VSTSX. They also offer target dates funds that handle gradually shifting to a more conservative allocation as enrollment date nears if that's what you want.
I agree that not all 529s are good, only 2 plans received a gold rating from Morningstar in 2022: Utah & Michigan. I wouldn't choose anything other than those.
Bullshit. 529 plans are great for tax avoidance. If you picked the wrong plan, or the wrong investments within that plan, then that's on you. Try a reputable, low-cost plan from a company like Vanguard.
I'm starting to feel the same, honestly. Do you know if it was just your plan or is there something where I can find more info showing how these are not smart investments?
They are not smart investments because you have no control over where the money is pointed in the plan.
So if you call your advisor, and say "i want my 529 to only focus on X" they tell you that you have no control over the index and the plan will be the most conservative 50-year-old actuary data which has no fucking clue where the market is heading and then berate you for when their 529 index loses value...
I was ready to pay that investment banker's family a personal visit with skills that I have accumulated over a number of decades.
In 2004 VTI was about $55. It's now $200. On a 19-year time frame a broad market index fund like VTI is the only thing you ought to have been invested in.
Perhaps the scam is when banks let people choose their own investments rather than have it be fully managed.
Well, 529s are a good way to avoid capital gains taxes on investments dedicated for education. In your case, they wanted to be extra sure that you would avoid capital gains taxes, so they lost money.
I'm more than a little curious on this one. How did you lose money in a 529? Are you saying you lost opportunity cost of having put that money somewhere else?
I don't get why people argue like this. It's so obviously disingenuous. Owning a share of an emerald mine doesn't make your family super rich and it's obviously, demonstrably, not where Musk's wealth comes from.
Musk's wealth is well documented. It comes from founding and selling a series of companies - not an emerald mine. Repeating the emerald mine meme is just a way to declare yourself a dishonest participant in the conversation - or perhaps you genuinely think you can fool people with obvious lies?
Errol claims they sold two emeralds randomly for ~$1000, which was then listed for a 10x markup, certainly a far cry from the "low quality emeralds" Elon stated. So we already see three things here: access to your investment's goods, a nonchalance about emerald access, and Elon attempting to downplay.
According to Federal Reserve, only ~15% of American families directly hold any stock. We're not even talking about direct investments to a private company here and the % is already low. There seems to be an inability to determine direct relationship from Errol to mine owner (to justify a very low investment at an early stage), so using logic, Errol passed some figure needed to gain any access. Likely not as high as people assume, but also not the nothing you've been attempting to brand it as in this thread.
The reason I'm calling out your lack of integrity is because you're attempting to shift discussion away from Elon's inability to be honest as the focus is on his upbringing, and instead trying to make this about his current forms of wealth. The latter of which, is not what people are discussing. Certainly you understand how peculiar this is correct? Defending someone by shifting focus to another topic and calling those you disagree with disingenuous while you do the same is a very good indication this is no longer rational for you, it's purely emotional.
You've already established your brazen disregard for the truth and ideological motivations - you don't need to keep demonstrating them.
That someone might've marked up a couple emeralds Musk may have sold once (I believe the story is disputed) doesn't prove the quality of emeralds at the mine. Your point about Americans holding any stock is equally bizarre. "Directly" does a lot of work there, indirectly, it's closer to two thirds of American adults, so I'm not even sure what point you think you're making. Nobody, including Elon, disputes that his parents were relatively wealthy, so even if the 15% figure you're citing weren't misleading it would be irrelevant.
Your general pattern of argument here is to tell obvious lies and then, when confronted, to spin off on pointless digressions. Musk came from a relatively wealthy family - that was never disputed by anyone, Elon included, and it's obviously not the source of his present-day wealth. What I would like to return to is my original question of why you would do this? I mean, you understand this is totally transparent, right? I get why your politics or ideology might compel you to slander people you dislike, but why wouldn't you try to do a good job of it?
The apparent existence of the emerald mine does put some shade on musk's purely "self-made" story. Even though, in reality, no one is truly, completely self made. But Musk has fully denied the existence of an emerald mine. But now his father confirmed it. So I don't think we can trust Musk's account here and I'm not sure we can trust his father's. So I think it remains to be seen how much family money supported Elon while he became "self-made".
The evidence we have is his father claiming to have helped his sons out to the tune of $115k and said father becoming essentially bankrupt in the 90s.
The Emerald mine denial was shady and dishonest, Elon probably thinking he can get away with it as "technically correct" because there was no actual mine that anyone can point to, just paying locals for any emeralds they have found lying around.
Elon seems about as self made as you can get in the USA, with the approximate amount of support you'd expect from an upper middle class family (helping pay for college and a small $28k business loan).
The first company, Zip2, was started with $28k of his dad's money.
If he hadn't been given that, he might not have been in a position to sell Zip2 for a massive profit during the dotcom boom. That sale is what made Elon personally very wealthy.
Where did the $28k come from? How much money did Elon's dad provide for his living expenses, international moves, etc while going through college and the Zip2 startup? Where did that money come from?
Musk's father invested 20-30k in Zip2 out of a 200k angel investment. That doesn't seem like a huge deal to me. For context, Musk dropped out of a grad program at Stanford to pursue Zip2. How many Stanford graduate students could raise 30k from their parents for a business venture?
As for where the money came from, I believe Musk's father owned an engineering business. Or maybe it was profits from a share in an emerald mine - what does that matter though?
> I don't get why people argue like this. It's so obviously disingenuous. Owning a share of an emerald mine doesn't make your family super rich and it's obviously, demonstrably, not where Musk's wealth comes from.
Interestingly, the intelligence level of the observer very often seems to have no effect. It's a very interesting phenomenon, I simply can't understand why humanity essentially ignores it.
I don't get why people argue like this. It's so obviously disingenuous. Owning a share of an emerald mine makes your means your family is somewhat rich maybe not filthy rich but rich enough to own a share of an emerald mine, which trust me, isn't cheap.
You have no idea how large a share it is or how large a mine it is. You simply discredit yourself and your arguments by assuming things without evidence. The description of the mine I'm aware of comes from Erol Musk where he says he traded a used plane that he had bought for 50k for 120k plus a share of a mine. Musk describes the mine as "a deposit in the middle of nowhere rather than a modern mine" [1].
So, he has an unknown share of a mine of dubious value. "Trust me, that isn't cheap." I think you've done a very good job of explaining why people shouldn't trust you, because, unbothered by a lack of knowledge you are happy to leap to conclusions.
About 60% of households in the U.S. are living paycheck to paycheck according to Google. Most families don't have an extra 50K just lying around to invest in a mine If your family does ave that, I'm guessing you're. well off. Maybe not filthy rich, but well off.
It’s incredibly disingenuous to suggest that the people who are invoking Musk’s emerald mine are actually complaining about the “cash in his pocket for living expenses.”
"Heir to an emerald mine" is intended to paint a very specific picture, and "some occasional spending cash from a handshake claim to a chunk of namibian rock outcropping (if we believe a man who doesn't exactly present as super trustworthy)" is definitely not it.
I'm no fan of Musk, but I'm even less a fan of being intentionally misleading.
This is certainly the image he would love people to have: a humble immigrant from the poor South Africa, hustling his way into the American dream.
The reality is that he is from a wealthy, well-connected, post-apartheid white family. They funded his coming to Canada, the US, University, and getting first business off the ground. The reality is that he has had a silver spoon his entire life.
Not to defend him, but having your parents pay for your education is hardly a rare circumstance. It's not the case for everyone, sure, but it is for plenty of ordinary people. I don't understand why Musk is supposed to be outstanding in this regard.
> Not to defend him, but having your parents pay for your education is hardly a rare circumstance.
This. Parents have worked their tails off to build a better life for their kids for millenia. Calling it a form of privilege seems like a gross misunderstanding of human behavior.
I think the way to take this comment is "He didn't pull himself up by his own bootstraps. And people need to stop pretending like any of his history means that he did."
Being born with privilege is not a choice, and so you are right people should not be shamed for that. The problem is something else. Details here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35919637
Maybe not rare in a very small bubble. That bubble of graduates, for example. But certainly rare given the entire world population. And even rare, within a generic western, white, culture (hardly a fraction goes to university of those, let alone being paid for it by family).
He's outstanding because he cannot be honest about the situation. Even his father contradicts Elon's claims. Elon claims he was in 100k debt during schooling, it's revealed he had scholarships and his father paid living expenses. It's revealed his father had involvement with emerald mines, going as far as to state they were regularly sold for upwards of $500 a piece, Elon then claims he doesn't remember anything except seeing a small jewelry box filled with "low quality emeralds".
Do you sense the pattern? It would be as if Paris Hilton went around repeatedly saying she was dirt poor and used her galaxy sized brain to start her own business without any help. People would, obviously and quite reasonably, mock it for its absurdity. Yet when the same happens to Elon Musk, there are endless hysterical defenses ready. As if you are telling a child that Santa isn't real.
Two thirds of Americans don't have a college degree. The most common professions in the country are clerk, cashier, food prep worker and truck driver. If your parents were able to pay for your university education you probably grew up at the upper end of the upper middle class, which is already a very lucky position to be in.
Ordinary people make about 35k per year, half make less. They're not paying for an expensive college education.
"having your parents pay for your education is hardly a rare circumstance" - What is your source for this? Why do you think the President wanted to forgive student loan if paying for education was not such a big problem?
Median American household income is $70k before taxes. Do you think this household can afford college tuition and expenses?
And the median family income of a U Penn undergraduate is almost $200,000 annually. Heck at Georgia Tech, where I went, it’s $130,000, and almost 1/4 of the students come from the top 5%. To put it another way—Musk’s level of family support is hardly unusual compared to that of the thousands of engineers who work for him.
Journalism at the national level is extremely competitive, and draws from a highly credentialed talent pool. The reason people with such credentials pursue such a low paying job is because their families are often quite affluent—they are often doctors, lawyers, etc.
University is far more expensive today than back then, too. Ironically this supports your point in Elon’s case, but today it’s very much not a given that parents can even minimally help their kids get through college. My wife’s couldn’t.
There is no evidence his family was wealthy by American standards. Errol has claimed in the interview with the Sun to have helped his sons at uni to the tune of $115k and gave them a $28k loan (as part of a $200k round of seed funding) for their first business. The only sources on the emerald mine are the Musks, where the claim is they acquired a share of an informal mine by trading in a small plane they owned (likely a $70k Cessna). Errol Musk went bust in the 90s and there's no evidence of any other family wealth flowing to Elon.
There is no evidence they had any useful connections to speak of and no evidence any family gave more than a fraction of his uni (half of $115k) and business ($28k) funding.
Yeah, and you had an authoctonous whose family bankrolled him all the way up to the White House and all you got was the Second Gulf War! And daddy’s boy even managed to drive into the ground all the businesses that he laid out for him to manage. Musk’s track record is at least better than that
Let me be more specific: why do the people speaking out about his "fortunate" past care so much? As long as it didn't come from something unethical, why does it matter to you?
I don't want read between the lines, but it's hard not to think it's a way for people to feel better about their own accomplishments by saying someone else had a massive head start.
Whether others do or don't, we should all be trying our best, be grateful for what we have, and proud of where we came from.
There are at least two big points for people to care about.
The money did come from something unethical--his family was enriched by segregation; racism; apartheid. That emerald money is dirty and is likely a key reason why Elon would deny its existence.
This brings us to the second thing: Elon lying about this. He has demonstrated that he is willing to lie about something this significant, which should do real damage to his credibility and trustworthiness if we are being logical and objective. What else is he willing to lie about?
Nope, they also conviently leave out that Errol was an anti-apartheid member of a city council and actively tried to abloish Apartheid. If Errol is to be believed, his role in the history of Apartheid is probably the most commendable thing about him.
The Emerald mine money (whatever small amount it was, likely under $70k given that seems to be the value of the plane he traded for the share) came from Zimbabwe. Its cleaner that Errol's propery money.
And Elon was misleading and disingenuous but could still make a case that he hasn't explicitly lied on these things.
I'm a former Rhodesian (present day Zimbabwe) who moved to South Africa after things went south in Zim. For context, I'm white, so it's not like I have a racial gripe against Musk. Elon went to one of the fanciest private schools in the country's capital and lived in one of its richest suburbs. Yes, technically Boys High is a public school, but people from outside South Africa don't know what the Model C school policy was. His father was extraordinarily wealthy and if you do read interviews by both Elon and Errol, they both admit this. His mother was an international supermodel and his family was generally pretty well connected in the greater scheme of things. The entire story about him struggling during college (where he went to an Ivy League university paid for by his father) is complete bullshit. I don't dispute his ingenuity in starting Zip2 (funded by his father too by the way), but he wasn't starting from the bottom with no help - that's the grossly inaccurate part that Elon still pushes for optics and people who are too stupid or unaware of how SA works lap it up.
> Elon's big start came from the success of X and Paypal
Funny you mention this as why he was self-made, where by all accounts he was considered an awful coder in this Paypal position, and was only able to be in the country (illegally) at the time, or secure this job, was because of his family's money and connections.
He was CEO of X.com for less than a year and was fired by the board. Then they merged with the predecessor to PayPal, which was more successful. He become CEO of the merged company, but was again fired for poor technical decision making (among other things, he insisted that the company build on the Windows stack instead of Linux) before the company rebranded itself as PayPal.
So, technically he was never the CEO of "PayPal", just the company that became PayPal, and he got himself fired by the boards of both the companies that turned into PayPal. He retained 11% ownership of PayPal and ended up making a decent amount of money from the EBay acquisition.
I understand all that, my question was why would it matter if he was an awful coder. Or they people thought he was an awful coder.
It is objectively true that he was ceo of x.com and PayPal, but neither of those positions require coding skills.
I’m not defending Musk as a CEO or human or anything. I’m just curious why it matters to bring up people thought his coding sucked. Was he a good chef? Was he terrible at Mario Kart? Want to list off other random complaints as well?
> This is an odd criticism as he was the CEO of PayPal.
He was an awful CEO of X (which is why he was forced out as CEO twice, and was never CEO of PayPal), too, which may be more to the point, and the successful product X named itself for after forcing himself out the second time was acquired (and was the occasion of his brief return) after Musk’s visions had failed.
> Why would it be important if he was an awful coder or not?
It probably wouldn’t, if he didn’t spend his time as CEO trying to do some other job instead. It’s not always bad if your CEO is doing some other role as well as being CEO, but its a doubly bad thing if they are doing some other role and they are a poor choice for the other job.
I wouldn't say awful but it's clear that he and Max Levchin did not see eye to eye, at least judging from Levchin's interview in Founders At Work. Musk pushed for them to move from Unix to Windows and Levchin disagreed with that move.
"...Peter took some time off. The guy who ran X.com became the CEO, and
I remained the CTO. He was really into Windows, and I was really into Unix.
So there was this bad blood for a while between the engineering teams. He was
convinced that Windows was where it’s at and that we have to switch to
Windows, but the platform that we used was, I thought, built really well and I
wanted to keep it. I wanted to stay on Unix..."
"...I had this intern that I hired before the merger, and we thought, “We built
all these cool Unix projects, but it’s kind of pointless now because they are going to scrap the platform. We might as well do something else.” So he and I decided we were going to find ourselves fun projects. We did one kind of mean project where we built a load tester package that would beat up on the Windows prototype (the next version was going to be in Windows). We built a load tester that
would test against the Unix platform and the new Windows one and show in
beautiful graphs that the Windows version had 1 percent of the scalability of
the Unix one. “Do you really want to do that?”...
...It was me acting out, but it was kind of a low time for me because I was not
happy with the way we were going..."
"...At the time, already I had
hated the guy’s guts for forcing me to do Windows, and then, in the end, I was
like, “You gotta go, man.” My whole argument to him was, “We can’t switch to
Windows now. This fraud thing is most important to the company. You can’t
allow any additional changes. It’s one of these things where you want to change
one big thing at a time, and the fraud is a pretty big thing. So introducing a new
platform or doing anything major—you just don’t want to do it right now.” That
was sort of the trigger for a fairly substantial conflict that resulted in him leaving
and Peter coming back and me taking over fraud...."
> Musk pushed for them to move from Unix to Windows and Levchin disagreed with that move.
Because Musk's push came from no objective reason beyond he "didn't know it". The Board said "you're the CEO, you don't need to know all the technologies".
I'd love to hear what people who talk about these family connections actually think they were and where they got this idea from.
I've heard it claimed hundreds of times but with no clear idea what these connections were, how they came about or what they were used for. Or even any evidence whatsoever that they existed...
Except even that also implies that Elon had some say in PayPal, when in reality, Confinity had already developed what would become PayPal, including filing trademarks and such, at the merger.
Musk's tenure in the newly merged company consisted of complaining incessently that he didn't like/know Solaris and Java so the working POC/prototype should be thrown away and rebuilt in Windows/ASP, for four months until the board had enough and terminated him as CEO.
>he didn't like/know Solaris and Java so the working POC/prototype should be thrown away and rebuilt in Windows/ASP, for four months until the board had enough and terminated him as CEO.
Goddamn the man hasn't changed one iota in twenty years.
Btw Musk had little to do with the success of X. The revenue of PayPal was merely $61 million at the time Musk was fired as CEO of X.com(later PayPal).
There's an unimaginable gulf between buying books paying tuition to college (especially back when that was affordable), and an investment in a business that's the equivalent of about $350k today.
Elon was never going to have to eat rice and beans, or go work in a cubicle for a big corp to pay the bills if any of his ventures failed.
You're reading that wrong. Elon is claiming his dad invested 10% OF a $200k round of seed funding. The actual amount was $28k. (See wiki: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zip2 )
I was being more charitable to Elon by trusting what he said himself. I know the $28k number. Almost 40% of the households with college age kids earn less than 70k before taxes. How many would be able to afford to give a $28k loan to their kids?
You weren't being charitable to Elon, you just either misread what was in the tweet or mistyped and claimed his dad invested $200k.
Median household income is $70k, so I'd expect you'd need to be upper middle class or quite good with money to loan $28k to your kids. I certainly won't argue that the Musks were poor, but there's a very big difference between "able to help their kids through college and loan $28k" and "silver spoon trust fund kids".
What’s hilarious is that okay, even if his dad made it up…
Elon has -also- said that he and his family would stuff their pockets with money and stones that wouldn’t fit in the safe from overflowing.
What next? “I only said I did it, but I never actually saw myself doing it?”
At some point there is a recognition that (at least) one of two things is accurate: 1) that a mine exists, or 2) that Elon is a serial liar.
Also, “get a million dogecoin”… is that before or after he hires a PI to go into your background for a little light character assassination for making him look foolish?
> Elon’s big start came from the success of X and Paypal
To which Elon contributed, AFAICT, money (both directly and in his ability to scare up capital), not management.
He was forced out as CEO of X when they had no product success, X bought the company that owned PayPal and briefly brought him back as CEO then forced him out against six months later, after which X renamed itself after its one successful product, which it had acquired.
The funny thing about it is that, even if the emerald mine had been real, it would explain maybe 1/10000 of Musk's wealth. If those who talk about the "emerald mine" had managed to multiply the wealth of their family by 10000 they would consider it an incredible success.
Back in those days, emerald mines were literally the equivalent of present-day tech IPO money. And if you read his biography by Ashlee Vance, you'll find out how the family would take vacations and travel to places by private plane.
> if there was Emerald Mine money there wasn't much of it.
You don't go to an American University as anything but a very rich African, or as a sponsorship. Source: I am a born African. I sure hope it was emerald money, else his father has some explaining to do to SARS.
Elon received a lot of money from his Father during his college years, and the very reason why he was in college in America is that he was bankrolled by a South African entrepreneur. Without this father he would be nowhere close to where he is.
Can’t you say the same about anyone who grows up upper middle class or above in the US? Paying for kids’ college is pretty standard. Many middle class families do it too.
There’s plenty to criticize Elon about, but this one’s a bit of a reach.
And even if he had been fabulously wealthy since childhood, it still wouldn't discredit his accomplishments. There's how many tens of thousands of mega-rich kids right now who won't do a single thing of note with their lives?
It does not matter if Musk had an emerald mine or not. For sure he turned a diamond mine (Twitter) to a shit pool. Do you trust him to be the CEO of your company? Ask yourself. I personally want a level headed guy.
You not agreeing with his choices != Twitter is doomed.
I've noticed zero difference as a too-frequent daily user. In fact, Twitter seems more fun now. Plus, community notes are sorely needed. In addition to all that, I'm also seeing an uptick in activity on my business account.
> I've noticed zero difference as a too-frequent daily user.
I assumed this was how it would go for me too, but after the change to elevate tweets and replies by blue check accounts I actually stopped using it because now, every time I look at it, it's just an orgy of the dullest and most ignorant and intellectually dishonest people in the world posting the worst crap I've ever seen. Last time I checked twitter.com the tweet at the top of my timeline was somebody "questioning" whether a recent mass shooter's multiple tattoos of nazi iconography could reasonably be interpreted to mean that he was in fact some flavor of neo-nazi. And so on and so forth.
I don't follow any of these fucking people! and I don't want to see this shit. It's absolutely soul-draining.
I'm sure there are plenty of people who'll say I'm using Twitter wrong, blah blah, whatever. I don't really care—all I know is I was enjoying using it in the way its UX encouraged me to use it and now it's horrible and I've stopped, probably for good. I do wonder how many others had/are having a similar experience.
I used to be addicted to Twitter, checking it 10+ times a day at the very least. Now the content I get is awful, and I only end up there whenever I follow someone else's link :/
I don’t get why people complain about the content they get on Twitter. Curate carefully who you follow, only follow people who stick to a topic of interest and don’t intermix pics of their dinner or other random BS.
Then change the option at the top of your timeline from “For You” to “Following” to only see posts from people you follow. Voila, now you get decent content that’s of interest to you.
I follow a few folks writing on war in Ukraine, but since maybe Nov-Dec they all disappeared from page, and I have to go all the way to the bottom of the barrel to see anything tangentially related. Only after the algo was released I understood that was a decision by Elon, for whatever reason...
It was in beta for a limited number of users exclusively in the US, but it certainly already existed before he took over. The feature was announced as "Birdwatch" at the beginning of 2021, Elons only contributions were renaming it to "Community Notes", and getting it out of beta if you're feeling generous, but that probably would have happened without him.
I used to have a lot of fun reading Twitter while watching eurovision.
It's way worse now. It may be less content. Or it's showing me less relevant content. Or it may be due to eurovision apperatly dropping hashtags from onscrean promotion.
Twitter isn't doomed. But rumors are that it is even more of a money pit than before, now that numerous advertisers have left the platform or reduced their spending.
The hiring of a mass media ad-exec seems to support the validity of those rumors.
I completely stopped using the app after his choice to elevate blue check replies instead of relevant ones. The app genuinely made me angry and it felt like my curation was pointless, especially since it would keep feeding me drivel from people I didn't follow
So Twitter is now like…everyone else? Instagram, Facebook and even Reddit (on mobile) don’t let you see their content without a login prompt either. Yet there are no 100 articles about Reddit dying.
I believe that I represent the average user, and in my opinion, Twitter has become worse than before, especially regarding the comments section. It appears that comments are no longer sorted by relevance, but rather by whether the user has paid for Twitter or not.
Every popular political thread on there is now a blue-check right-wing echo chamber. I guess if that's your personal political bubble it feels great, but I don't think that's the "average" user.
If this stops every political threads then I’m all for it. It’s weird to me how people were so into it and I had a few friends who became tough to talk to because it was always trying to convey some esoteric (to me) twitter screaming match.
This doesn’t seem like a loss to me as I feel that kind of stuff isn’t only boring to me but kind of worse to have people so angry about politics. So this seems like a positive development to me if it’s now clearly just a right-wing echo chamber that people can now ignore.
I’m not a heavy user and haven’t noticed any changes really, but I never interacted with blue check mark people and always thought it was kind of a lame feature. And is still lame that people can pay for it.
Wow, a much more vitriolic first comment than I would expect from HN. The last six months has not lacked for Musk-hating enthusiasts howling “Twitter is dead.” But when I look at Google Trends, its story is that interest in Twitter is almost identical to where it was 5 years ago. Doesn’t seem so dead to me?
Have Musks changes have been net positive or negative? No shortage of internet opinion on that Q. Regardless of one’s personal feelings on it, it seems hard to dispute that Twitter moves faster than before. I consider that no small feat given how much legacy code and bureaucracy the company had at the time of his acquisition.
If he can free more of his time by making this hire, I am looking forward to seeing whether that translates to even faster iteration times. pg and all the others I followed are still there, so still plenty of potential to create quality entertainment/learning w less regret than Facebook
This is very well written and made me laugh.
When you're objective about it, it's all accurate, and pretty shocking.
What's shocking to me is that Elon could be so successful at Tesla, and fail so spectacularly at Twitter. Of course the skills are different, but the general skillset of being a COE and not making stupid business decisions should be universal.
Also, he claimed Twitter was losing millions per day and that's why he had to fire everyone, when in reality, the millions per day in loses were interest on the loan he'd used to buy Twitter. So he created the problem, and then blamed that. Pretty shocking.
Twitter was pretty awfully run even before he bought it. Their business metrics were absolute crap for a business of their scale and in the pandemic environment.
The jury is still out if new Twitter has failed or not.
Before his purchase, twitter was a company that had hope of profitability as a regular occurrence, if they could adjust some spend on infrastructure and engineering.
That's a lot harder to do with a giant debt crushing your soul, by a guy who can't really put any extra money into it to give it runway. All of the changes Elon has made to twitter have been desperate attempts to get some cash to stay alive, because the company is in a desperate position. At one point, they were down something like 50% in ad spend. Not many places can survive with new billions in debt and half the revenue. I don't know if he has been able to convince advertisers to come back, but they are fickle, stupid, and have no memory so surely that's a possibility, and this new CEO might be an attempt to convince advertisers his hands are off the wheel.
If your mature social media site that’s been around for over a decade and has hundreds of millions of users has a 1% margin and effectively lost money in 2020, you’re not a well-run organization.
To give you an idea of their incompetence, when you create a Twitter Ads account, you’re asked to choose your time zone. I’m in UTC+5:30. Except you can’t choose half hour increments, so I was forced to choose UTC+5:00. All the data and reports had the time error.
My time zone is home to over 1.4 billion people.
If your billion dollar corporation that depends on ads can’t even be bothered to fix the time zone selection for 1/6th of the world’s population in its flagship product, its not a well-run business.
I wonder if part of his "effectiveness" is that he seems so willing to burn everything down. As long as he preserves this image, he can maintain a level of control that other CEOs can't. Kind of the CEO version of the Madman Theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madman_theory
Reportedly the leadership of SpaceX manages him like he's a medieval boy king. They spend a lot of time figuring out how to get him to come to the right conclusions and making him feel like he's in charge. I would bet that Tesla does the same thing.
Twitter didn't have this management layer, and we have now seen the result.
> Reportedly the leadership of SpaceX manages him like he's a medieval boy king
A family friend who works closely with Elon at SpaceX puts it like, "you have to make him believe that your technical conclusions and recommendations are actually his to have any hope of traction." Otherwise, even if you're proven right years later when Elon's strategy fails, he will hold you to task for, "not convincing him hard enough."
I think the answer is pretty obvious: the skills are wildly different, and Musk obviously didn't even understand what he's supposed to be doing at Twitter.
Tesla is relatively simple: you've got to make cool cars. They have to work and people have to want to buy them.
SpaceX is relatively simple: you've got to make rockets. They have to work, and be cheaper than the competition.
With Twitter it seems he doesn't understand that there's nothing to build really. The software's already there. Twitter's main job is purely social, trying to please a whole bunch of governments and advertising agencies, as well as understanding why people post there and how to make them post more. There's no straightforward technical test to it, it's a delicate social balancing problem, and one awfully ill-suited to Musk's typical "move fast and break things" approach.
I, for one, believe that Twitter is better now than it was before. But I'm a free speech proponent, and very not in favour of a previous approach of banning and muffling anyone who fell out of party line.
I think the stance on this issue greatly influences how one perceives changes at twitter.
> cancelled most of the API, and tried to extort the very brands his platform depended on in a cash-for-validation scheme that backfired spectacularly.
Rumor has it they lacked the manpower to actually keep the API running and it was a last-ditch attempt at getting rid of bots. Same bots who flocked to the platform after the layoffs started since people in charge of mitigating these were fired.
Firing abuse and content moderation teams meant there was a lot more unsavory spam on the platform and advertisers didn't want any of it near their brand. In a few week Twitter lost half of it's top 100 biggest advertisers [0] and it doesn't seem they are coming back.
What's crazy to think about is that, despite being "bloated" Twitter managed to have profitable quarters pre-acquisition.
>he singlehandedly fired nearly every employee, accidentally locked the remainder out of the headquarters
And yet the site still works and engagement is up.
>mis-branded news outlets as state-sponsored,
BBC is state sponsored as long as they larp as an arm of the government with their fake “TV Licensing” arm with threats of government punishment for not paying. If they want to stop doing that then they can claim independence but while they use government powers and police to fund themselves through threats, they’re state sponsored.
Yet, twitter has been going along just fine, despite all the negative press, nay sayers and nonsense you have been talking about.
Not to say Musk has been a little careless with his communication through all of this, but still, people want to sit in front of there computer and think they know better.
Musk has some good ideas among the bad ones, I'm kind of happy with the developments. It was fun to watch removing pieces of the company and infrastructure, it was fun to see him expose himself as Free-speech NIMBY. It was fun to see how much people are willing to pay for status. All the risks about the fascists and media manipulations? Well, all those had been realised already, Twitter was horrible place. It kind of improved actually.
If everything goes south, It's on the Musk and company's tab anyway. So, en expensive drama to watch on some rich people's dime.
what's crystal clear to me is that your specific echo bubble (we all have one), advertises constant negative press about him. it doesn't make it real, twitter is booming and people love him more than ever
i hope you someday find the happiness to stop micro-observing everything about what elon is doing in his day to day life
> In the seven months since Musk bought the company he singlehandedly fired nearly every employee, accidentally locked the remainder out of the headquarters, turned blue-check validation into a living nightmare for international brands, un-banned some of the most notorious and repugnant users from white nationalists to bigots and racists, mis-branded news outlets as state-sponsored, threatened to open a news agency to impersonation on his platform, cancelled most of the API, and tried to extort the very brands his platform depended on in a cash-for-validation scheme that backfired spectacularly.
The emerald mine + hand wavy dismissal of his achievements is pretty wishful thinking. You can be totally repulsed by his behavior and trolling. But he has taken a few giant swings and hit them out of the park.
- effective $$$ from cutting the workforce by a small stadium worth of people
- ad revenue sharing in development
- long form video in development
- streaming video/podcasts in development
- encrypted dms being tested
And that's all there or coming in hot over the next few months. Pretty damn good for a company that apparently just barely operates if you listen to its detractors.
Over a couple of years it will morph into #1 news and media site on the planet (it's not really a social network).
By all metrics the blue revenue are much smaller than the drop in advertising dollar they experienced.
You live in an echo chamber if you think advertising has returned to the same level, it’s been well reported through various sources.
Anyway it’s all private so we can only argue against imaginary number. If you think that Elon is getting rich from this 44 billion purchase, only time will tell.
Yeah whenever I visit twitter now the adverts are really frequent, so maybe they just think "oh lots of ads, I guess the advertising revenue is normal". Like for every 5 normal tweets I see one "promoted" tweet, and about a third of the time it's some scammy product or service. I just went to twitter.com now and scrolled to check "normal tweets" (tweets or RTs from people I follow) and which were adverts:
- 3 x normal tweets
- advert (alza.cz)
- 3 x normal tweets
- advert (some scammy weight loss program called "mad muscles")
- 4 x normal tweets
- advert (t-mobile)
- 4 x normal tweets
- advert (some rubber feet product for washing machines so they don't jump around or fall over? is this a problem people have?)
It's going to collapse when the lawsuits from the former employees (from the C-suite down to janitors) catch up, and when the fines from the FCC and EU hit.
That could be 3 months or 18, but it's going to happen unless there's a complete about face at Twitter.
All the fired employees Musk didn't treat as he was obligated to. From the former CEO [1], to the rank and file [2], down to the contracted out janitors [3].
most of what you said rang true. except the "wealth from emerald mine" attack. that appears to be a myth
his big score was PayPal, and it seeded what followed. Tesla and SpaceX very early almost wrecked him financially
we can criticize his Twitter shenanigans. but he's clearly a workaholic, highly effective, and helped put humanity in a better place (via SpaceX and Tesla, anyway
The @CommunityNotes feature is genius but it's too slow on disinfo related to the Russia/Ukraine war and it doesn't work against people like AOC and Tucker Carlson who have big extremely loyal fanbases that mark notes as "not needed".
I agree with all this, except for the part where he accurately described US media as state sponsored. The US state works for US corporations and US corporations own the media. Also, NPR does get some public money.
Less than 1% of NPR funding is from govt. Tesla and SpaceX get far more public money than NPR does. $7500 per vehicle subsidy. Lucrative NASA contracts.
Care to elaborate on how mid-level air force officers are "benefitting" from ULA contracts? A rocket is a rocket, buyers should be fairly vendor-agnostic.
Wikipedia says more like 11%, but it’s pretty complex. NPR produces programs that local stations play, and pay for. So while you might hear someone say they’re listening to NPR, they’re listening to a “member station,” that is paying NPR. They might get some money from federal grants, some from the corporation for public broadcasting, which is federally funded, some from member stations who get some federal grants. So I’m not sure if all the info you’d need to figure it out completely is public. I assume corporate sponsorship beats out federal funds by quite a bit though.
You're forgetting the corporate funding and that their editorial line parrots the state department.
Also, SpaceX deployed Starlink to provide guidance to (US provided) Ukrainian weapons. Field commanders said without it they wouldn't be in the fight. That sounds aligned with US foreign policy and statecraft to me.
They backpedaled after the use of the technology became so aggressive it would be reputationally damaging for starlink.
"Federal funding is essential to public radio's service to the American public and its continuation is critical for both stations and program producers, including NPR."
> This is 44bn of musks backing investors finally waking up to the fact that the willy-wonka they trusted to shepherd a communications platform was in fact just a billionaire heir to an emerald mine
In his investors’ defense, Elon had a singular track record prior to Twitter. And his proposal to turn Twitter into X, aka US—based WeChat, was not a terrible one. It was an expensive investment, but there was a plausible positive outcome.
His complete and total bungling of it all would have been difficult to predict in advance based only on what was known then. He is seemingly oblivious to the unintended consequences and second order effects of both his actual decisions, and their rash and heavy-handed manner. It’s odd, and not surprising they forced a professional CEO on him.
The thing is he really could have done it. But he went "rich person crazy" and lost it all instead. Really sad to see. Marc Andreessen said something like "
Taylor Swift announces her concert on Twitter and then you go buy the tickets on Ticketmaster - why not buy them on Twitter?"
You are severely misinformed. You just repeated all the BS talking points from the MSM. Stop reading clickbait and actually follow the guy closely if you want to know what's going on.
have to agree, I love new Twitter. No complaints, it's working great for me. The content matching is just fine... and as a blue subscriber I seem to actually get interactions when I post, which makes me want to keep posting.
Where exactly did that $44 billion go? With the tax incentives Twitter had from SF, and the massive layoffs... There was a fuck-ton of money that went somplace... to where?
In the seven months since Musk bought the company he singlehandedly fired nearly every employee, accidentally locked the remainder out of the headquarters, turned blue-check validation into a living nightmare for international brands, un-banned some of the most notorious and repugnant users from white nationalists to bigots and racists, mis-branded news outlets as state-sponsored, threatened to open a news agency to impersonation on his platform, cancelled most of the API, and tried to extort the very brands his platform depended on in a cash-for-validation scheme that backfired spectacularly.
This is 44bn of musks backing investors finally waking up to the fact that the willy-wonka they trusted to shepherd a communications platform was in fact just a billionaire heir to an emerald mine on track to grift them out of their dosh for his own petty feud with 'the libs.' Frankly its astounding theyre permitting musk to continue to do anything at all, albeit i suspect his new r&d role is about as authentic as his college credentials.