Musk’s dad, the emerald mine and ‘the blacks’ – truth revealed in new biography

A new biography of Elon Musk, the controversial SA-born billionaire, has confirmed the existence of emerald mines in Zambia tied to his father.

After he took over Twitter, now known as X.com, criticisms resurfaced about a long-standing rumour about his family’s connection to emerald operations. In April, Musk, who also heads up Tesla and Space X, vehemently denied the existence of the mines and offered a million Dogecoin, worth around R1.6 million at the time, to anyone who can prove that the mine existed.

In the book, author Walter Isaacson explains that in 1986, Musk’s father Errol sold a Cessna plane to a Panamanian-Italian entrepreneur in exchange for “a portion of the emeralds produced at three small mines that the entrepreneur owned in Zambia”.

The mine was reportedly not registered because the postcolonial “black” government did not have a functional bureaucracy. The book says that Errol never had an ownership stake in the operation.

“If you registered it, you would wind up with nothing, because the blacks would take everything from you,” Errol is quoted as saying, before adding that he is not racist.

“I don’t have anything against the blacks, but they are just different from what I am.”

Errol reportedly imported the raw emeralds and had them cut in Johannesburg.

“On trips overseas, I would sell emeralds to jewellers. It was a cloak and dagger thing, because none of it was legal.”

The business eventually collapsed after Russians created an artificial emerald in a lab.

Musk is renowned for being a self-made billionaire who worked his way up to become one of the richest people in the world. He previously said that when he left SA and moved to the US, he lived off $1 a day to see if he had what it took to become an entrepreneur. He also said he worked his way through college, ending up with $100 000 in student debt.

The first apparent reference to the mine was in a Musk interview with The New Yorker in August 2019. He did not directly say anything about the mine, but the article stated that after his parents divorced, he went to live with his father, “Errol, an electrical engineer who would later own an auto-parts store and a share in an emerald mine”.

In an interview with Forbes’ Jim Clash in July 2014, Musk is quoted as saying:

In South Africa, my father had a private plane … we’d fly in incredibly dangerous weather and barely make it back. This is going to sound slightly crazy, but my father also had a share in an emerald mine in Zambia.

The interview is no longer on the Forbes website and is only available on the Internet Archive.

Errol told Business Insider that Musk and his brother Kimbal once decided to sell emeralds to Tiffany & Co. on Fifth Avenue in New York while he was sleeping.

“They just walked into Tiffany’s and said, ‘Do you want to buy some emeralds?’ And they sold two emeralds, one was for $800 and I think the other one was for $1 200.”

He said the family was so wealthy that “at times we couldn’t even close our safe”.