At the age of 10, Elon Musk began learning to code on a Commodore VIC-20. After transferring to the University of Pennsylvania, Musk began gravitating towards business and technology. The book offered a six-month programme to learn to code, but Musk went through it all in three days. Musk was accepted to study for a PhD in Applied Physics at Stanford, but dropped out and partnered with his brother Kimbal to start a software company, Zip2.At 17, Musk moved from South Africa to Canada, where he planned to live with his great-uncle in Montreal.
Instead, Elon risked it all, once again, and put a hundred million dollars into creating a space exploration company called SpaceX, with goals such as sending people to Mars, keeping human consciousness alive even if the Earth is destroyed, and turning the human race into a "true spacefaring civilisation". Elon Musk taught himself to code and created his first video game when he was ten years old. In this regard, Musk modestly states that, despite appearances, he often feels that his brain is over-capacity. Today there are several coding languages to learn, and each tends to develop over time.
It took Musk a bus ride of almost 3,000 kilometres to find a second cousin to offer him a place to stay. In addition to the 5 kb of memory, the computer package also came with a guide on how to program, which took him just three days to learn. As this TED talk by Khan Academy founder Sal Khan points out, a house built on a shaky foundation will always be shaky, and the same goes for learning. For Musk's team at Tesla, improved graphics in video games allow them to better simulate self-driving cars with the help of artificial intelligence.
Although gaming has been his passion since he was a child, Musk wanted to have a bigger impact on the world. While many of Musk's achievements involve much more than sitting down at a laptop and writing some code, none of what he has done would have been possible if he hadn't first sat down as a 10-year-old South African boy and learned to code.
