[imagesource:pixabay]

Elon Musk is the perfect example of why taller trees get more wind. The moment you stick your head above the tree line, you get buffeted from all sides. But if your tree makes you richer than every other living person on the planet, you should expect some gusts.

The latest drama and confusion around Elon seems to have shifted from his Twitter adventures and taken a trip down memory lane. Memory is perhaps an accurate term as it seems different people have different recollections of Elon’s past.

The most recent ‘Elon News’ involves a dispute around whether his family did indeed own a Zambian emerald mine.

Elon says they didn’t and even put up a one million Dogecoin (R1,37 million) reward to anyone who could prove they did.

Elon Musk, the controversial SA-born Twitter CEO, has offered a million Dogecoin, worth around R1.6 million, to anyone who can prove that his family partially owned an emerald mine in Zambia during the mid-1980s. | @News24_Business https://t.co/sCQW5SKq66

— News24 (@News24) April 13, 2023

His supposedly ‘evil’ dad however disagrees and recalls taking little Elon to the mine as a child, where they had to endure eating ‘stamp mielies’ while the Povo miners pulled the supposed Musk riches from the ground.

Errol Musk goes further and insists that Elon would have seen emeralds lying around the house while he was younger. He even quipped that he wondered if he was eligible for the Dogecoin reward.

Elon responded by saying he was talking kak, and that he, Elon Musk, had to scrape his way through college by working in a lumber mill and relying on bursaries. All the while he had to take care of his deadbeat dad.

Elon and Errol have an acrimonious relationship, with the billionaire calling his father a “terrible human being” and “evil” in an interview with Rolling Stone.

Did they own a mine, or did Elon claw his way to billionaire-ness with nothing but bursaries and brains to help him? Hell, at this point it’s probably irrelevant.

Elon’s schooling history is however just as murky. According to Elon, he attended Pretoria Boys’ High School, where he was apparently bullied mercilessly. Once again, Errol claims that yes, he was bullied, but not at Boys High, but at Bryanston High.

Errol insists that Elon was moved to Pretoria Boys High after his beating, where he completed his school years from grade 10 to matric. This seems to be somewhat corroborated by reports that Musk agreed to make a once-off R1 million donation to Boys High on the condition that the school never contact him again.

This time it was the principal of Boys High that called kak, saying that Musk had donated to the school several times, suggesting the billionaire had a wholly different experience than was described in the stories.

“What is not true is that he disliked the country or the school so intensely that he told me not to approach him again. I, in fact, did, and he sent a second donation per that request.”

Musk matriculated from Boys High at 17, with distinctions in physical science and computer science and afterwards apparently left South Africa for Canada to avoid conscription in the South African army and pursue opportunities abroad.

Whether they owned a mine or not seems to remain a mystery. So too which school he was moered at or whether he donated once, twice, or thrice to his old alma mater.

What is however certain is that Elon’s path took a trajectory that made hangers-on and requests for donations to schools par for the course. Elon struck it rich pretty early on as the below video of him accepting his Mclaren F1 reminds us, so all this speculation is rather irrelevant.

This was also when he still had a receding hairline, and way before the vultures started circling.

[source:mybroadband]