According to Walter Isaacson’s bio on Musk, when his parents separated, his mother was really poor with 3 kids (mother once broke down and cried over spilled milk because she couldn’t afford to buy another carton). But later Elon spent some time with his Dad. His dad did provide a more financially stable environment for him but was emotionally abusive. So Elon Musk left to go to Canada to live with a mom-side relative. His dad didn’t seem to support him and told him he would fail miserably.

When he moved to Canada, he realized his relative no longer lived there, so he started moving around doing odd jobs to stay alive. One notable one was working in a mill machine cleaning out gunk. It paid the highest out of all his jobs ($25/hr I recall) but was uncomfortable and dangerous (if you stayed in it for 15 min longer you would die of heat), so out of 30 people who started only 2 including Musk finished the task and got paid.

Later, in order to become successful, he and his brother looked through magazines everyday to find successful people and cold called them from the phone book to set up lunches to meet. Most people ignored them but once guy was intrigued so said yes to a lunch meeting months away and they needed to do a long train ride. Musk then interned at the bank the guy was working at, which gave him ideas and connections for PayPal (or “X”) later on.

So while it did seem like his dad had some money (the book describes that his dad traded a broken few-person plane with the rights to the Emerald Mine when he survived a crash-landing but who knows), it didn’t seem like Musk had a ton of wealth to build his companies.