Elon Musk didn’t actually inherit any wealth; he emigrated to America essentially broke and didn’t get rich until PayPal. Also, his father is still alive, so any inheritance hasn’t even happened yet.

Setting that aside, how does being the son of a guy who owned an emerald mine in South Africa explain him being richer than the descendants of Henry Ford or John D. Rockefeller? How do explain the children of all the other emerald mine owners?

He went to a fancy private boarding school as a boy and his family had connections.

> how does being the son of a guy who owned an emerald mine in South Africa explain him being richer

That's faulty, a posteriori reasoning.

I don't believe Elon had any more undue privilege than any other Stanford graduate. (Which is not none, but it means none of the emerald stuff matters.)

There's no need for any such influence anyway, getting rich from PayPal is already pure luck and you should be satisfied complaining about that!

What I am doing is falsifying your hypothesis. If being born to rich parents, having connections, and going to boarding schools is the sole reason people get rich, then we would expect that people with richer parents and more connections who went to better boarding schools than Elon Musk would be richer, and people who grew up in similar conditions to Elon Musk would be equally rich. This is not true.

> What I am doing is falsifying your hypothesis

That is not what you are doing. You are picking a winning lottery number and saying why did this number win and others not? That's faulty logic.

No, I’m looking at two “lottery tickets” with the exact same numbers and asking why one of them one the jackpot and the other one didn’t. The only conclusion: it’s not a lottery and what you have picked out as the winning lottery numbers are not that.

To be fair you'd have to compare people who had the same circumstances and desires, not simply both being rich.

You're really bad at logic but you're confident in it; that's not a good combination.

I believe most people mean significant family wealth, not necessarily post-death inheritance.

You can’t seriously claim that he was broke while being part of an emerald mining family? Also, why are you comparing him to other rich/er folk? Is your point that every extra million is an IQ point?

And what good was his family wealth for? How much of it actually played a role and how? Did he get millions from his family to start PayPal?

I hear a lot about the role of "family wealth", but I never actually hear about mechanism, how exactly it helps. If you're a legacy of a wealthy family, and thanks to that, get into Harvard, then sure, that's a real leg up, but it doesn't explain why some Harvard graduates become billionaires, while overwhelming majority do not. Similarly, if your family is rich enough to invest $1M in your startup, that's surely a huge advantage over regular people, but given how easy it is for non-scions to get $1M in investment funding (and it's really easy), I can scarcely believe that "family wealth" is really such a huge causal factor.

I clicked on the first link. Is the point here that Elon Musk is a billionaire because parents bought him a new car when he was in his twenties? If this is the example of how family wealth allows people to get ahead in life, then, well, allow me to continue to disregard it. What kind car you drive has pretty much zero impact when it comes to achieving wealth or success.

> You can’t seriously claim that he was broke while being part of an emerald mining family?

Unless he was completely estranged from his father for almost his entire adult life, which seems to be the case.