I was specifically talking about his accomplishments and ignoring your slave labor part. You were specifically talking about slave labor and ignoring his accomplishments part.
I did look up the slave labor thing and found a lot of people talking about it and the evidence is murky at best.
Is it true that Elon Musk's family got their wealth from apartheid emerald mining?
https://www.quora.com/Is-it-true-that-E ... ald-mining
Jeremy Arnold
Studied at Brock UniversityAuthor has 888 answers and 9.5M answer viewsUpdated 1y
I asked Elon about this.
The myth began with an interview his father Errol gave to Business Insider South Africa in 2018, in which he relayed a story about once trading an old plane for some cash and a share in a Zambian emerald deposit.
But there were problems with the story:
None of it was corroborated
The quantity of wealth that came from the supposed emerald flow was never quantified
The journalist suggested a direct link between the emeralds, the family’s overall wealth, and Elon’s later success
One of the resulting articles had a US headline that claimed the family still owned the mine (despite there never having been formal ownership, despite any emerald supply having died out some 30 years prior, and despite Elon and his father being quite famously estranged)
That story then mutated into a myth that grew to include the idea of apartheid or “blood emeralds”, despite Zambia (i) not being a conflict gem country, (ii) having been a regional ringleader of anti-apartheid activity at the time.
(If we want to take it further, Errol was also a city councillor in Pretoria back in the 1970s, having run with an anti-apartheid affiliation.)
Profile photo for Geoffrey Widdison
Geoffrey Widdison
Chemical Engineer (2006–present)Author has 12.6K answers and 106M answer viewsApr 19
Elon Musk’s father claims to have made a large amount of money by investing in an emerald mine in Zambia. Zambia wasn’t under apartheid. Musk was South African, which was under apartheid at the time, so the likelihood is that someone referred to it as “apartheid-era emerald mining”, and the details got dropped as the story spread.
The details of how much money Musk made from said mine, and for how long, really aren’t clear. Elon Musk and his father are apparently pretty thoroughly estranged, and have been for some time. The most we can say is that, when Elon Musk was a child, at least some of his family’s income appears to have come from an investment in an emerald mine.
That, however, is in no sense the source of Elon Musk’s wealth. Other than in the sense that it helped to pay for his education as a child. Elon Musk didn’t come from poverty, but he became insanely wealthy by building insanely successful companies. And none of those were built on family money. So the Musk family money right now comes from Paypal and SpaceX and Tesla and what have you.
Profile photo for David Moe
David Moe
Lives in Canadian Rockies (2006–present)Upvoted by
Christopher John Anderson
, former Quality Technician at Tesla (2018-2021)Author has 6.8K answers and 79.5M answer viewsMay 20
No, Elon Musk’s family got their wealth from Elon Musk. Although growing up they had so much money they couldn’t close their safe door, his father was a representative of the anti-apartheid Progressive Party, with the Musk children sharing their father's dislike of apartheid. Regardless, his parents divorced and Musk is now estranged from his father.