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How did Elon Musk first get interested in programming? By playing video games. The founder of Tesla and SpaceX spoke about his love of video games and how they launched him on his career path at a video game convention last year.
Today, we may not think of Musk primarily as a programmer. He’s the founder of three companies that tackle today’s toughest engineering challenges: building affordable electric cars with great range, colonizing Mars, and digging tunnels through the worst city traffic. This week, he also became the third richest person in the world, beating Mark Zuckerberg after the Dow Jones Indices announced that Tesla would be added to the S&P 500 index next month and that the company’s share price. had jumped. 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 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 great experience because the hotels all had arcades. So my first thing was, when we went to a new hotel, to go to the arcades, ”Musk told astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson on an episode of Tyson’s radio conference. Star Talk show a few years ago.
“I thought I could make my own.”
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 a first Commodore computer, along with a manual on how to program in BASIC, an early computer language. He absorbed the knowledge by reading the manual, much the same technique he used to learn himself how to build rockets almost 20 years later.
At age 12, after mastering BASIC, Musk sold the code for his PC game Blastar to a PC magazine for around $ 500. Eleven years later, he and his brother founded Zip2, a company that supplied city guides, maps and yellow pages to the newspaper industry, and which they ultimately sold to Compaq for $ 307 million. dollars. Musk says he did most of the coding for Zip2, mostly at night when the software was not in use.
Musk used the funds from that sale to co-found X.com, which after a merger eventually became PayPal, which sold to eBay in 2002 for $ 1.5 billion. This high-profile sale and the millions Musk has earned as PayPal’s largest shareholder has given 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 made his mark when he fell in love with video games in these hotel arcades and decided to make one himself, which directly led to his phenomenal success today. ‘hui.
It would likely come as a surprise to the millions of parents who have harangued their children to put down the checker and talk to family members, go 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, spending hours playing video games can be a much smarter way to spend time than you might think. Just ask the third richest man in the world.
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