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How did Elon Musk first get interested in programming? Playing videogames. The Tesla and SpaceX founder spoke about his love of video games and how he started his career 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 powerful reach, colonizing Mars, and tunneling through the worst city traffic. This week, he also became the world’s third-richest person, surpassing 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 rose. None of that would have happened if Musk hadn’t learned to code, because he loved video games so much.
It all started when he was about 10 years old and his father took him on a trip from South Africa (where Musk was born) to the United States. “It was a really amazing experience because all the hotels had game rooms. So my first thing was, when we went to a new hotel, to go to the game rooms,” Musk told astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson in an episode of the talk. Tyson’s radio station. show Star Talk a few years ago.
“I thought I could do mine.”
Video games are “incredibly attractive,” Musk said. “They made me want to learn to program computers. I thought I could make my own games.” Musk managed to acquire an early Commodore computer that came with a manual that explained how to program in BASIC, an early computer language. He absorbed the knowledge by reading the manual, more or less the same technique he used to learn how to build rockets almost 20 years later.
At age 12, having mastered BASIC, Musk sold the code for his Blastar PC game to a PC magazine for approximately $ 500. Eleven years later, he and his brother founded Zip2, a company that provided city guides, maps and yellow pages for the newspaper industry, eventually selling to Compaq for $ 307 million. Musk says he did most of the Zip2 encoding, mostly at night when the software wasn’t in use.
Musk used the proceeds from that sale to co-found X.com, which after a merger, eventually became PayPal, sold to eBay in 2002 for $ 1.5 billion. That high-profile sale and the millions Musk made as PayPal’s largest shareholder gave him both the funding and name recognition to get scientists and automotive engineers to take him seriously when he set out to build spaceships and electric cars. . In other words, Domino Musk overcame when he first fell in love with video games in hotel arcades and decided to create one himself, leading directly to his phenomenal success today.
This would probably surprise the millions of parents who have harangued their children to get out of control and talk to family members, get out and get 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 type of person who goes from playing a game to wanting to create one, then spending hours playing video games can be a much smarter way to pass the time than you think. Ask the third richest man in the world.
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