Elon Musk: Playing Video Games Helped Make Him a Billionaire

Elon Musk Says“ This Fun Activity Is What Started Him Toward Success.

Most parents think it’s a big waste of time.

Did you know? How Elon Musk first get interested in programming? By playing video games. Yes it’s right the Tesla and SpaceX founder talked about his infinite love for video games. And he told that how they helped him on his career path at a video game convention last year. 

Today, we may not know that Musk primarily is a programmer. He’s the founder of three major companies working on today’s most challenging engineering & technology problem. Building budget friendly electric cars with huge range, colonizing Mars, and digging under the worst traffic. This month, he also became the world’s third richest person, beating out Mark Zuckerberg after Dow Jones Indices announced that Tesla will be added to the S&P 500 index next month and the company’s share price grown. This would not have happened if Elon Musk hadn’t learned how to do coding, because he loved video games.

It was all begin when he was only 10 and his father took him on a trip from South Africa (where Musk was born) to the United States. “It was a really awesome experience because the hotels I stayed all had arcades. So my number one thing, when we went to a new hotel, was to go to the arcades,” Musk told astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson on an episode of Tyson’s radio talk show Star Talk a few years ago. 

“I thought I could make my own.”

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 managed to acquire an early Commodore computer which came with a manual that explained how to program in BASIC, an early but effective computer language. He picked up the knowledge by reading the manual, mostly the same technique he used to teach himself how to build rockets almost 20 years later.

Milestone

At age 12, having great command over BASIC, Musk sold that code for his PC game Blastar to a PC magazine for approximately $500. Eleven years later, he and his brother founded another company Zip2, a company that provided city guides, maps, and yellow pages for the newspaper industry, and which they sold to Compaq for $307 million. Musk says he did most of the coding for Zip2, mostly at night when the software hadn’t been use.

Musk used the funds from that sale to co-found X.com, which after a being merged became PayPal, and then sold to eBay in 2002 for $1.5 billion. That high budget sale, and the millions which Musk earned as PayPal’s biggest shareholder, gave him both the funds and the name recognition to get rocket scientists and automotive engineers to take him seriously as he made his mind to build spaceships and electric cars. Let’s say, the domino Musk walk over when he first fell in love with the video games in hotel arcades and then decided to build one himself led directly to his astonishing success today.

This would be a surprise to the millions of parents who’ve tirade their children to stop playing video games and talk to their family members, go out and get some fresh air, play with their siblings, or generally find another good way to spend their time. And some research suggests that most people who cast aside school or work to play video games aren’t doing themselves any favors. But if you, or your child, are the sort of person who can go from playing a game to willing to create one himself, then spending hours on video games may be a better way to spend time than you might think. Just see the world’s third richest man.

To read about Musk’s Neauralink Technology, Click Here.

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