grubstake

Musk, for instance, got at least part of his grubstake from an emerald mine his family owned during the apartheid era in South Africa.

Small-time investors already have fled, their grubstakes or life savings decimated.

Mr. Trump hasn’t known fact from fiction since the day he called his daddy’s grubstake of $1 million “a small loan.”

He made a grubstake of, by all accounts, selling black market blue jeans and computers.

Both, as it happens, were attributes prized by Charles Lewis Tiffany, who helped found a store that sold stationery and fancy goods in 1837 with a $1,000 grubstake from his father.