Not only did his own father call Elmo out on his fake “rags to riches” story, by throwing a bag of unrefined emeralds on the table.
Elmo even went as far as to state his father had a stake in an apartheid emerald mine in an interview in Forbes of 2014.
He tried to get the interview removed of course, but it still is on the Wayback Machine.
Excerpt:
JC: How do you handle fear?
EM: Company death – not succeeding with the company – causes me a lot more stress than physical danger. But I’ve been in physical danger before. The funny thing is I’ve not actually been that nervous. 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 brother’s – which turned out to be six months overdue! So we had this planeload of contraband and an overdue passport from another person. There were AK-47s all over the place and I’m thinking, “Man, this could really go bad.”