Elon Musk’s wealth didn’t begin with him.

It all began when, in the mid 1980s, his father Errol Musk and a copilot set off to the UK in an effort to sell the plane they were flying.

However, they never made it, and when Errol returned to South Africa he had a half-share in a Zambian emerald mine, reports Business Insider.

The story goes a little something like this:

On their way to England, Errol and his copilot got word that their original flight plan was going to cost a lot of money.

“We were going to fly into Jeddah [Saudi Arabia] and there was a religious holiday and they said if we come in now we have to pay $2,000 but if we wait 10 days we can come in at no charge. So we decided to head back to Lake Tanganyika from where we were, I think we were in Djibouti.”

There, the two South Africans ran into a group of Italians who, as it happened, were in the market for an airplane. Errol named his price, and a deal was done.

“So we went to this guy’s prefab and he opened his safe and there was just stacks of money and he paid me out, £80,000, it was a huge amount of money,” he said.

Standing with the cash in his hand, Errol was made another offer he couldn’t refuse: Would he like to buy half an emerald mine for half of his new riches?

“I said, ‘Oh, all right’. So I became a half owner of the mine, and we got emeralds for the next six years.”

It was a lucrative decision, and one that would help fund his family’s lavish lifestyle of yachts, skiing holidays, and expensive computers.

Errol employed a cutter in Johannesburg, and sold the stones wherever his travels as an engineer or family holidays took him.

And it was that lifestyle, Errol explained to Forbes, that turned Elon into the “kind of merchant adventurer” who would later break the rules of the motoring business with Tesla, then go on to change spaceflight with SpaceX.

However, speaking to Rolling Stone last year Elon revealed that his father, although a brilliant engineer, was a “terrible human being”:

According to Elon, Errol has an extremely high IQ – “brilliant at engineering, brilliant” – and was supposedly the youngest person to get a professional engineer’s qualification in South Africa. When Elon came to live with him in Lone Hill, a suburb of Johannesburg, Errol was, by his own account, making money in the often dangerous worlds of construction and emerald mining – at times so much that he claims he couldn’t close his safe.

But there was another side to Musk’s father that was just as important to making Elon who he is. “He was such a terrible human being,” Musk shares. “You have no idea.” His voice trembles, and he discusses a few of those things, but doesn’t go into specifics. “My dad will have a carefully thought-out plan of evil,” he says. “He will plan evil.”

Besides emotional abuse, did that include physical abuse?

“My dad was not physically violent with me. He was only physically violent when I was very young.” (Errol countered via email that he only “smacked” Elon once, “on the bottom.”)

Elon’s eyes turn red as he continues discussing his dad. “You have no idea about how bad. Almost every crime you can possibly think of, he has done. Almost every evil thing you could possibly think of, he has done. Um…”

Just a little awkward.

You can read Forbes’ full profile on Errol here.

[source:businessinsider]