His dad was half owner of an emerald mine.

From wikipedia:

"The family was very wealthy in Elon's youth; Errol Musk once said, 'We had so much money at times we couldn't even close our safe.'"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk#Childhood_and_family

Incorrect. Earlier on, his parents were well educated and had good jobs, and enough money that his father owned an airplane. This alone makes your "at best" remark highly inaccurate. At a minimum in Musk's early life he was very comfortably in the middle of the middle class, but I would class nearly any family with enough disposable income to have an airplane to be "wealthy". Your standards for this may vary, and I'm open to your definition of wealthy being much higher, but his family was far from poor.

On top of that, his father has claimes he sold the plane for the equivalent of about $300,000 in today's money and used some of it to purchase shares in gemstone mine, which then went on to make them even wealthier. This isn't independently confirmed. His father may have exaggerated. However others have said his family also own the largest house in the area, which sounds wealthy to me.

Elon has disputed some of this, but not offered details beyond merely disputing some of this. He said his parents have been supported financially for the last 20 years, but going back 20 years from when he made that statement would put it in the late 90's, so it is not incompatible with growing up wealthy even though he now supports his parents. Plenty of multi-millionaires would tell their parents, "Hey, if you don't want to you don't have to work anymore. I got this".

Also none of this is incompatible with Elon's own account of arriving in Canada with little money & ending up with student debt. It's possible Elon exaggerated but for these purposes I'll take him at his word. Because by his own account Elon didn't like Apartheid. His father also has a reputation of being quite an asshole. It would be perfectly understandable for him to "peace out" and go his own way, and it wouldn't change the fact that growing up his family was wealthy. In fact I know someone who did pretty much the same thing: Their father was terrorized the family in fear & abuse, but was extremely successful with a very expensive first house, another vacation home, etc. His father wanted him to continue in his (professional) footsteps but he wanted none of it, joined the military for the free education and after getting out went on to become extremely wealthy himself.

A "middle class" South African with a Canadian passport in his back pocket acting as an escape hatch for when apartheid was close to collapsing.

Meh, whatever you think of the 'angle' of the NYTimes article, it was pretty clear from talking to his classmates that they were in a very wealthy area of Joberg.. his dad was successful in business (being part owner of at least one mineral mine) and was a local politician.

> Interviews with relatives and former classmates reveal an upbringing in elite, segregated white communities that were littered with anti-Black government propaganda, and detached from the atrocities that white political leaders inflicted on the Black majority.

> Mr. Musk, 50, grew up in the economic hub of Johannesburg, the executive capital of Pretoria and the coastal city of Durban. His suburban communities were largely shrouded in misinformation. Newspapers sometimes arrived on doorsteps with whole sections blacked out, and nightly news bulletins ended with the national anthem and an image of the national flag flapping as the names of white young men who were killed fighting for the government scrolled on the screen.

> “We were really clueless as white South African teenagers. Really clueless,” said Melanie Cheary, a classmate of Mr. Musk’s during the two years he spent at Bryanston High School in the northern suburbs of Johannesburg, where Black people were rarely seen other than in service of white families living in palatial homes.

They go onto say that Musk had black friends and left SA to avoid serving the apartheid government via mandatory military service.