Are you going to go further on the whole Paypal situation? The fact that he was running the company into the ground, had to be ousted and replaced all of which occurred before Paypal saw any success?

The 'luck' there is that he got removed and replaced by someone far more successful, but retained a large share of stock.

> Was it lucky that he happened to start what became PayPal with some others?

Yes, it was luck. You could say it was 95% luck, because of course the product has to exist to get lucky so it's not entirely luck. If you made a copy of PayPal tomorrow, would you be rich? What if 100 people did? A thousand? You will misattribute this to idea that there must have been _something_ special about PayPal, but the reality is it was luck.

> Was it lucky that he took on an Electric car company and turned it into what it is today?

This one has less to do with luck, because Elon is already very,very rich by the time he is working with Tesla, same thing for SpaceX. However, remember that prior example about your starting up a copy of PayPal? Tesla is not the only electronic car company, and I would personally never recommend someone buy a Tesla, there are simply better electric cars.

So at this point, it is, in my opinion, hero worship, marketing, and giant coffers.