If you can prove Elon Musk's family co-owned Zambian emerald mine, he'll pay R1.6m in Dogecoin

• Elon Musk has offered a million Dogecoin to anyone who can prove that his family partially owned an emerald mine in Zambia.
• Musk has vehemently denied that his family was ever involved in an emerald mine, and says it has never existed.
• However, an interview of him with Forbes that has been scrubbed from the internet, and his father's comments to Business Insider, directly mention the mine.
• For more financial news, go to the News24 Business front page.

Elon Musk, the controversial SA-born Twitter CEO, has offered a million Dogecoin, worth around R1.6 million, to anyone who can prove that his family partially owned an emerald mine in Zambia during the mid-1980s.

Musk, who also runs Tesla and SpaceX, is renowned for being a self-made billionaire who worked his way up to become one of the richest people in the world. He previously said that when he left SA and moved to the US, he lived off $1 a day to see if he had what it took to become an entrepreneur. He also said he worked his way through college, ending up with $100 000 in student debt.

After he took over Twitter, criticisms resurfaced about a long-standing story about his family's connection to an emerald mine in Zambia. Musk has vehemently denied that his family was ever involved in an emerald mine, and says it has never existed. He doubled down on Thursday with a reward, made up of the meme crypto, for proof of the mine's existence. 

However, an interview with Forbes that has been scrubbed from the internet, and his father's comments to Business Insider, directly mention the mine.

The first apparent reference to the mine was in a Musk interview with The New Yorker in August 2019. He did not directly say anything about the mine, but the article stated that after his parents divorced, he went to live with his father, "Errol, an electrical engineer who would later own an auto-parts store and a share in an emerald mine".

In an interview with Forbes' Jim Clash in July 2014, Musk is quoted as saying:

The interview is no longer on the Forbes website and is only available on the Internet Archive.

In February 2018, Errol told Business Insider that in the mid-80s, after a series of events that involved him landing his plane in Zambia, he "became a half-owner of the mine, and we got emeralds for the next six years".

Errol told Business Insider that Musk and his brother Kimbal once decided to sell emeralds to Tiffany & Co. on Fifth Avenue in New York while he was sleeping.

"They just walked into Tiffany’s and said, 'Do you want to buy some emeralds?' And they sold two emeralds, one was for $800 and I think the other one was for $1 200."

He said the family was so wealthy that "at times we couldn't even close our safe".

'Elon overstepped'

Musk was also apparently severely bullied. Errol previously told BizNews that Musk was so badly injured after being attacked by fellow pupils at Bryanston High School that he "didn't recognise him".

Musk said in his biography by Ashlee Vance that he was pushed down a flight of stairs, and after that one of the bullies repeatedly bashed his head on the ground: 

More recently, Errol told AFP that Musk had made a hurtful comment to a schoolmate about his father's suicide, and the boy pushed him down a staircase.

According to AFP, when he heard what had happened, Errol wanted to defend his son. "But I realised Elon overstepped the mark with this little boy. I had to drop it," he said.