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How did Elon Musk first get interested in programming? Playing video games. The founder of Tesla and SpaceX talked about his love of video games and how they started it on his career path at a video game convention last year.
Today, we may not think of Musk primarily as a programmer. He is the founder of three companies tackling today’s most challenging engineering problems: building affordable electric cars with great range, colonizing Mars, and tunneling through the worst urban traffic. This week, he also became the third richest person in the world, beating Mark Zuckerberg after the Dow Jones Indices announced that Tesla will be added to the S&P 500 index next month and the company’s stock price has risen. None of this would have happened if Musk hadn’t learned to code, because he loved video games so much.
It all started when he was around 10 and his father took him on a trip from South Africa (where Musk was born) to the United States. “It was a really great experience because all the hotels had arcades. So my first thing when we went to a new hotel was to go to the arcades,” Musk told astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson in an episode of the Tyson’s radio speech shows Star Talk a few years ago.
“I thought I could do it myself.”
Video games are “incredibly engaging,” Musk said. “They made me want to learn how to program computers. I thought I could make my own games.” Musk was able to acquire an early Commodore computer which came with a manual explaining how to program in BASIC, one of the first computer languages. He absorbed the knowledge from reading the manual, much the same technique he used to teach himself to build rockets nearly 20 years later.
At the age of 12, after learning BASIC, Musk sold the code for his PC game Blastar to a PC magazine for about $ 500. Eleven years later, he and his brother founded Zip2, a company that provided city guides, maps and yellow pages for the newspaper industry, which they eventually sold to Compaq for $ 307 million. Musk says he did most of the code for Zip2, mostly at night when the software wasn’t in use.
Musk used the funds from that sale to co-found X.com, which after a merger eventually became PayPal, which was sold to eBay in 2002 for $ 1.5 billion. That high-profile sale and the millions Musk earned as PayPal’s largest shareholder gave him both the funds and the name recognition to get rocket scientists and automotive engineers to take him seriously as he set out to build spaceships and electric cars. In other words, domino Musk pushed himself when he first fell in love with video games in those hotel arcades and decided to create one himself which led directly to his phenomenal success today.
This would likely come as a surprise to the millions of parents who have harangued their kids to put down the controller and talk to their family, go out for some fresh air, or generally find a more constructive way to spend their time. . And some research suggests that most people who drop out of school or work to play video games aren’t doing themselves any favors. But if you or your child are the kind of person who goes from playing to wanting to create one, spending hours playing video games could be a much smarter way to spend time than you might think. Ask the third richest man in the world.
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