The last one about Musk is highly speculative, both in how much his father was actually worth and how much of a stake he had in South African minerals.
What regularly gets overlooked is his mother who was a California movie starlet from a wealthy family, who got her son into Stanford. Once there, Musk took out big student loans to host raging keggers just off campus. He made friends with a bunch of future Silicon Valley elites and weaseled himself into a number of early business ventures - PayPal most notably - while skating by in his classes.
Like Bezos (who got chummy with a bunch of hedge fund investors worth significantly more than $300k in his early days), his ahem network was his net worth. The cheap borrowing power allowed him to continuously make risky investments and fail upwards, while his carny skills (likely learned from a father famous for peddling scam investment claims, like selling shares to played out emerald mines to suckers) got him into more and more social circles with more and more investment money.
The last one about Musk is highly speculative, both in how much his father was actually worth and how much of a stake he had in South African minerals.
What regularly gets overlooked is his mother who was a California movie starlet from a wealthy family, who got her son into Stanford. Once there, Musk took out big student loans to host raging keggers just off campus. He made friends with a bunch of future Silicon Valley elites and weaseled himself into a number of early business ventures - PayPal most notably - while skating by in his classes.
Like Bezos (who got chummy with a bunch of hedge fund investors worth significantly more than $300k in his early days), his ahem network was his net worth. The cheap borrowing power allowed him to continuously make risky investments and fail upwards, while his carny skills (likely learned from a father famous for peddling scam investment claims, like selling shares to played out emerald mines to suckers) got him into more and more social circles with more and more investment money.