Sorry your Google is half-broke so you only get shitty half answers.
From a bit of searching around, his father bought half of an emerald mine for £40K in a fluke deal with some Italians in Africa, which seems to have stayed in operation for 6 years, and presumably is the source of those good times. While no final numbers are given, let's just say it's doubtful that £40K multiplied into more than say £4m in that amount of time, and that for a guy owning planes & Rolls Royces, i.e. serious expenses. Note that the big lesson of Elon "walking around with emeralds" was in selling 2 for £2K total and seeing them sold to final buyer for about 100x that - something that mine owners and farmers notice regularly, but doesn't quite make them that rich, whatever the humorous safe tale and Rolls Royce bit, and considering his parents divorced when he was 9, due to his father's new squeeze and sprout, with Elon staying mostly with his mom, that emerald money in the safe might not have been in an Al Gore-certified lockbox for him.

Anyway, as Elon remarks (which of course might be embellished, you know how these "jabronis" do):

You’re just a troll/bot, but I will reply anyway. I arrived in Montreal at 17 by myself with $2k. No support, no contacts, nothing. Father said I’d fail & be back in 3 months.

I don't know who paid tuition in the end, but this seems to be rather backed by further anecdotes: [more early work experience in the link, including renting out a frat house as a party house on weekends]

After leaving South Africa in 1988, Musk spent time working a series of odd jobs around Canada. According to Ashlee Vance’s biography on him, Musk first tended vegetables and shoveled out grain bins at a cousin’s farm in Waldeck, and then learned how cut logs with a chain saw in Vancouver. After a visit to the unemployment office, he inquired about the job with the best wage, which turned out to be a gig cleaning the boiler room of a lumber mill. For $18 an hour — a great wage in 1989 — the grueling work involved wearing a hazmat suit, crawling through small spaces, and shoveling residue in extremely high-temperature conditions, according to Musk.

His father does seem to have provided $28K to Elon & brother's startup a few years later, which doesn't quite seem to obviate the "self-made man" moniker, as distinctly less than the $1 million given to prime the Trump, much less the $30 mill/year "Living with the Kardashians" that Kylie got her cut of on her way to a fat billion dollars.

And at the end it doesn't matter - it's hard to say that Elon's father's money rather than his engineering example along with own hard work was responsible for him building Zip2, then PayPal, then SpaceX, then Tesla, then Solar City.  Not that I ridicule Kylie Jenner (since even if she had $50m in the bank, that doesn't equal promoting herself & cosmetics to $1 billion), but I consider Elon Musk's engineering design & business innovation efforts vastly more complex and impressive than selling perfume and clicks off a known personality.

I guess we can continue this for another round if you see a point. Though rather than me being a Muskovite, I see you as more the Musk-ox intent on goring him for whatever slight. I guess he's been a grave disappointment for some reason - we had such high hopes.

only the magic orb knows what the future will behold:

ok points taken. All I was trying to say is that iconoclast genius does not usually jive with any communal systems, including publicly traded corps. And here you have your believers in capitalist communalism and jealousy of rich people and haters of iconoclasts and haters of elites all ganging up together, making an exceptionally big bunch.

Traditionally people like him had elite patrons protecting from the masses, or the lowest common denominator at the time.

This is why the Henry Ford story of going mass market and succeeding is still very compelling. While many were still screaming get a horse you idiot....it is something special about U.S. culture but it takes an extra special genuis with multiple skill sets to not appear offensively elite.