How did Elon Musk first get interested in programming? Playing video games. The founders of Tesla and SpaceX talked about their love of video games and how they got started on their career path at a video game convention last year.
Today we don’t primarily think about musk as a programmer. He is the founder of three companies facing today’s most challenging engineering problems: building a very good range of affordable electric cars, colonizing Mars and tunneling under bad urban traffic. This week, he also became the third richest man in the world, with Dow Jones indicators announcing that Tesla would be added to the S&P 500 index next month and beating Mark Zuckerberg when the company’s share price rises. None of this would have happened if Musk hadn’t learned how to code, as he loves video games.
It all started when he was about 10 years old and his father took him on a trip to the United States from South Africa (where Kasturi was born). “It was a really wonderful experience because the hotels had all the arcades. So my first thing was, when we moved into the new hotel the arcades were going to go,” Musk told astrophysicist Neil Degrass Tyson on an episode of Tyson’s radio conversation. Show Star Talk a few years ago.
“I thought I could make my own.”
Video games are “incredibly exciting,” Musk said. “They wanted me to learn how to program a computer. I thought I could make my own games.” Kasturi managed to get an early mod modor computer, which comes with a manual that explains how to program in the computer’s beginner, basic. He absorbed the knowledge by reading the guide, almost the same technique he used to teach himself how to build a rocket after about 20 years.
At the age of 12, after mastering the basics, Kasturi sold the code for his PC game Blaster to PC Magazine for about $ 500. Eleven years later, he and his brother founded a company called Zip2, which provided city guides, maps and yellow pages for the newspaper industry, and eventually sold the Compaq for $ 307 million. Musk says he did most of the coding for Zip 2, mostly at night when the software was not in use.
Kasturi used the proceeds from the sale to co-found X.com, which, after the merger, eventually became PayPal, selling it to eBay for 1.5 1.5 billion in 2002. PayPal’s high-profile sales as its largest shareholder and the millions of Musk gave it both funding and name recognition to take rocket scientists and automotive engineers seriously in preparing to build spaceships and electric cars. In other words, when Domino Musk first fell in love with video games at the hotel arcade and decided to make his own, he went straight to his phenomenal success.
This will probably come as a surprise to the millions of parents who have tormented their children to put down the controller and find a more creative way to talk to their family members, to go out and get some fresh air or to spend their time in general. . And some research suggests that most people who drop out of school or work playing video games are not doing themselves any favors. But if you – or your child – are the type of person who goes from playing games to making a wish, then spending hours on video games may be a way to spend more time than you think. Just ask the third richest person in the world.
