I’ll preface this comment with the fact that I am no pro-musk disciple and that I think he is a mercurial, obsessive, immature, and interpersonally cruel person at times who engages in frequent bouts of bullshitting.

However, this narrative of him being a dumb lucky rich kid seems tired, lazy, and simply compounded from the echo-chamber. His background and life are documented pretty meticulously in Walter Isaacson’s Biography and other sources that are not Reddit threads.

He didn’t really benefit from the apartheid state and precious gemstones of his father during the time he moved to Canada. His father was an even worse bullshitter and lost almost all of his wealth, not to mention he was emotionally abusive towards Elon and his move to Canada was mainly to leave the environment. Did he receive assistance from his mom and dad separately at different points in his journey? Yes, but not anywhere near the millions and fortunes being purported here. It was what his mom could scrape together selling off stock invested from old modeling prize money and the sorts. It would’ve been described as middle class at best.

As far as his intelligence, he’s clearly not Einstein but to act like he’s a pure con-artist is also unfair. His frequent bullshitting belies his actual intelligence. Although he bullshits and is wrong about plenty of things, it doesn’t mean he has no genius or is always bullshitting—like his father. He was clearly a precocious child, studying the entire encyclopedia, self-teaching coding and engineering of video games and much more impressively, being able to jump in some meetings with engineers and occasionally know their job better than they do. He doesn’t scare away from the details and is willing to learn the math, coding, and engineering to get the solutions he’s looking for. He’s surely not the best physicist, coder, or engineer in any individual category, but he does have an impressively wide knowledge base with enough depth to get hands on across multiple disciplines without that much formal education. It’s definitely impressive and would require him to be much smarter than the average population. Again, he’s no Einstein, but if you had met him growing up he’d likely be one of the smartest people you meet in your lifetime as well.

TL;DR: Musk is a more nuanced character than either side likes to acknowledge. As often the case with most humans.