Elon Musk’s success is more about “being in the right place at the right time” than any sort of business or technological genius, according to columnist Terry Prone.
On Newstalk Breakfast this morning, the Chair of the Communications Clinic said Musk was ‘born into money’ and suggested the success of PayPal was likely down to “somebody else who didn’t get half the payoff” he did.
She was speaking after the 51-year-old added Twitter to his portfolio of billion-dollar companies, which also includes Tesla and SpaceX.
Ms Prone compared the South African to former US president Donald Trump, suggesting that he built his empire with money handed to him by his father.
“The issue is that many people are describing particularly Elon Musk by saying, oh he’s made a lot of money you know,” she said.
“Historically, right throughout history, there are two reasons people get rich. One is they are born into it, as he was and as Trump was, and the other is they effectively steal it.”
“Therefore, to look at these guys, like Trump and like Musk, and say ah they must be really clever, they made a lot of money – not true.”
Innovation
When it was put to her that Musk has shown himself to be an innovator in his work with PayPal, Tesla and SpaceX, Ms Prone suggested: “We have no idea who the actual originators of these things were.”
“I doubt very much that Elon Musk sat up in bed one morning and said do you know what, I’m going to invent PayPal,” she said.
“I suspect somebody else who didn’t get half the payoff for it did that.
“The thing that is being credited to him is innovation but it is much more - as is common with millionaires - being in the right place at the right time.”
Elon Musk
While Musk grew up in comfortable circumstances in Pretoria, South Africa, he has always insisted that his wealthy father Errol had no involvement in his first company – Zip2, which he set up with his brother Kimbal.
Errol Musk has claimed that he invested in both his son’s college education before helping them get their company off the ground, but Musk has denied all this, insisting the funding for the company came from a small group of random angel investors in Silicon Valley.
He claims to have slept on the couch in the office while establishing the company, before selling it for around $300m four years later.
He says he used that money to found X.com, which eventually merged with Confinity to form PayPal.
American Dream
Ms Prone said the story Musk tells is akin the myth of the American Dream.
“The fact is you can’t look at people in the dustbowl, people with nothing except a cart and maybe a horse, trying to get to some land that wasn’t impoverished and say well they could have come up with something,” she said. “They couldn’t have.”
“Whereas it would have been almost a miracle if Elon Musk didn’t succeed.”
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