I don't believe Elon had any more undue privilege than any other Stanford graduate. (Which is not none, but it means none of the emerald stuff matters.)

There's no need for any such influence anyway, getting rich from PayPal is already pure luck and you should be satisfied complaining about that!

What I am doing is falsifying your hypothesis. If being born to rich parents, having connections, and going to boarding schools is the sole reason people get rich, then we would expect that people with richer parents and more connections who went to better boarding schools than Elon Musk would be richer, and people who grew up in similar conditions to Elon Musk would be equally rich. This is not true.

And what good was his family wealth for? How much of it actually played a role and how? Did he get millions from his family to start PayPal?

I hear a lot about the role of "family wealth", but I never actually hear about mechanism, how exactly it helps. If you're a legacy of a wealthy family, and thanks to that, get into Harvard, then sure, that's a real leg up, but it doesn't explain why some Harvard graduates become billionaires, while overwhelming majority do not. Similarly, if your family is rich enough to invest $1M in your startup, that's surely a huge advantage over regular people, but given how easy it is for non-scions to get $1M in investment funding (and it's really easy), I can scarcely believe that "family wealth" is really such a huge causal factor.

> You can’t seriously claim that he was broke while being part of an emerald mining family?

Unless he was completely estranged from his father for almost his entire adult life, which seems to be the case.