Are we old enough to take the train?’” he says. “There would always be a conversation of ‘Let’s go somewhere. The cousins had a near-constant desire to do something different. ( Their brother Russ now runs the art, technology, and design company SuperUber, in Brazil.) Each family also has a sister: Tosca Musk, a filmmaker, and Almeda Rive, a competitive dirt-bike rider. Those budding teen tycoons included two sets of brothers: Elon Musk, whom you’ve likely heard of, and his brother, Kimbal, a fellow entrepreneur focused on trying to change America’s food culture and Lyndon and Peter Rive, the founders of SolarCity. This is a piece of lore essential to understanding what may be the 21st century’s First Family of entrepreneurship, a family of happy capitalists intent on cracking today’s toughest problems by building businesses. This is not the kind of scheme most 14- or 15-year-old relatives dream up, but these were not most 14- or 15-year-olds.

Purchasing from them, they said, would mean the buyer was supporting young capitalists. When neighbors balked at the price, the boys responded as they’d rehearsed. And instead of selling these chocolate eggs for the going rate, they cranked up the price to 10 rand. So the young cousins melted regular chocolate, molded it into egg shapes, wrapped the chocolate eggs in foil, and went around the poshest parts of their Pretoria neighborhood. Here’s an idea that one of five young South African cousins threw out sometime in the 1980s: What if they could arbitrage the cost of chocolate in an Easter egg? Plain old chocolate at the time cost virtually nothing, but a nicely packaged chocolate Easter egg cost about one rand.

Lyndon rive