Yeah, I'd like to see a picture of this alleged emerald mine.

I'm guessing by now you've come across the tale of the emerald mine, the one Elon Musk once bragged about, but which he now says never existed.

He never owned an emerald mine. This is total bullshit.

That's a clip from a BBC interview Musk gave in April of 2023.

But what's the real story behind the mine? In August 2009, a New Yorker story made

with Musk's cooperation first mentioned that his father had a share in an emerald mine.

It wasn't until almost five years later that the Mercury News reported it had been located

near Lake Tanganyika in Zambia after speaking to Musk's father, Errol.

This is where things get really interesting.

On July 28, 2014, Forbes published an interview with Elon where he told a fabulous story

about his trips to the mine.

It went like this.

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. I was 15 and really wanted to go with him, but didn't realize

how dangerous it was. I couldn't find my passport, so I ended up grabbing my brothers, which turned out to be

six months overdue. So, we had this plain load of contraband and an overdue passport from

another person. There were AK-47s all over the place, and I'm thinking, man, this could go really bad.

It's hard to know how much of that story was true or false, and less than two months later,

it disappeared from the web almost entirely. Luckily, it was backed up in the internet archive.

The journalist who did the interview has since said he's not sure why it disappeared,

...