Just been reading about the whole Musk family wealth saga and honestly, it's wild how differently Elon and his dad remember things.

So Errol Musk tells these stories about having so much money back in the day that they literally couldn't close their safe. Like, bills just hanging out everywhere. He claims there was this emerald mine in Zambia, and young Elon would casually walk into Tiffany & Co. with emeralds in his pocket, sell them for a couple grand, only to see them marked up to 24k later. Pretty extravagant stuff if true.

But here's where it gets interesting - Elon's version is completely different. In a 2022 tweet, he basically said there's zero evidence the mine ever existed. Nobody's seen it, no records, nothing. He acknowledged his dad had a decent engineering business for a while, but that's it. No inheritance, no major financial gifts handed down. Actually, the opposite happened - his dad's situation got worse over the decades.

According to Elon, he and his brother Kimbal have been financially supporting their father for years now. Not exactly the "overflowing safe" narrative Errol was pushing.

What's kind of telling is that despite all this, Elon still takes care of his dad. The support's conditional though - comes with strings attached about behavior and all that.

It's one of those situations where two people have completely different memories of the same family history. Elon's dad remembers wealth and emerald deals, but Elon describes growing up middle to upper-middle class without much happiness, and then having to step up financially once his father hit hard times.

Kind of puts things in perspective when you think about where Elon ended up - building Tesla, running SpaceX, becoming one of the richest people alive - while his dad ended up needing his sons' support. Wild how life works out sometimes.