Elon Musk inherited an apartheid emerald-mine fortune and bought his way into Tesla and SpaceX.

Elon left South Africa at 17, worked in Canada, then studied in the U.S. Zip2 was a 1990s software startup; Compaq bought it in 1999. X.com, which became PayPal, is where the real stake came from: roughly $180 million after eBay’s acquisition. That is the documented seed of SpaceX (2002) and of his 2004 Tesla investment.

Errol Musk has, at various times, claimed a stake in Zambian emerald production and later walked the story back to “a portion of the emeralds.” Maye Musk has described a comfortable household, not a dynastic mining house. Walter Isaacson’s biography and contemporaneous reporting find no transfer of mine wealth into Zip2, PayPal, Tesla, or SpaceX.

A father who once dealt in stones is a colorful origin tale. It is not a substitute for the cap tables, the PayPal payout, or the decade of near-bankruptcy at SpaceX and Tesla that followed.