Overview of Elon Musk’s 50th Birthday Falsely States Family Owned a Mine

Tesla CEO Elon Musk briefly became the world’s richest person earlier this year, and while his family came from relative wealth already, Musk’s climb to billionaire status has been all but lucky.

According to an overview of the Tesla CEO’s life shared by The Independent, Musk was born to Errol Musk and Maye Musk in South Africa, Maye being a model and finalist in the Miss South Africa beauty competition and fronting magazines Vogue and Time.

While the Business Insider report details the owning of an emerald mine, it has been clarified by Musk there has been “no evidence whatsoever of an emerald mine”. Back in March of this year, Musk detailed and linked to a different article that was “actually accurate”.

Elon and his brother Kimbal Musk founded the software company Zip 2, which was purchased by Compaq in 1999 for $307 million in cash, with Musk receiving $22 million for just 7 percent of the shares.

Musk then founded X.com, later merged with Confinity, as founded by Peter Thiel, and later the company created the Paypal money exchange service – which was purchased by eBay in 2002 with Musk as the largest PayPal shareholder.

Not long after, Musk invested over $100 million received from PayPal’s sale into SpaceX and Tesla, to which Kimbal said Elon was “in debt,” and “more than broke.”

The saga went on for years before Elon’s widespread success, with Musk even saying that Tesla nearly went bankrupt in 2008, and a couple of times in later years. In recent years, Musk has remained near the top of the wealth period, with Tesla’s rapid 2020 share price increase bringing him to the point he’s at today.