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Originally Posted by Brian Swartz
This is simply false. He founded Zip2 with his brother and most of the money for it coming from investors. It was sold for $307 million four years later. Leaving aside his complicated involvement with X.com and PayPal, which it's debatable how much credit he should get for, he founded SpaceX which is worth well north of $100 billion. Others share credit for what has happened at Tesla, but they've unquestionably had a significant impact in a product that's vital to the future of society and one that it is a major player in it's industry. Very little of what he's done is due to 'his daddy's money'.
I don't think genius or not-genius is worth debating, but the odds that there is a single member of this forum who would have been able to do with Musk has done, given the exact same starting resources/conditions, is remote in the extreme.
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Yeah, that investor in Zip2 was his Daddy and his Daddy's friend. And he didn't cash out all that much from that deal because other firms had to step in along the way and fix their business.
His big payday was Paypal, which he should get credit for getting involved in. If you read the history of the company, you know he was mostly the money man and they had to push him out when they realized he was going to bankrupt them pretty quickly.
SpaceX and Tesla existed before he got there. Both companies rely on handouts from the government to make money and stay in business. They could not survive in a true free market.
I'll give him credit that he's a good marketer. He built a persona up that he's some Tony Stark guy (media helped him with that) and not just a trust fund baby who made some good investments and gamed the system. There is also a skill in getting billions in handouts from taxpayers. He's a modern day Trump in that regard where his name trades well and the success of the businesses don't really matter.