The genius and billionaire owner of Tesla, SpaceX, and Twitter was a geek like all of us back in the 80s. So much so that we have now found out that he programmed a video game in his teens.
Elon Musk is in the news every day of the week and never for good things. Since he bought Twitter, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX has not stopped making controversial decisions about the bluebird social network.
With each of them, the media (and users) have jumped. You may disagree with his tactics, but his business acumen is impossible to mess with. SpaceX trails only TikTok on the list of most valuable private companies. At the same time, Tesla was the second fastest company to reach the $1 billion market capitalization barrier.
Musk’s path to business dominance began at a young age. While attending the University of Pennsylvania, he and a friend opened a successful nightclub in his rented house. Musk later earned degrees in physics and economics from the University of Pennsylvania. But the germ was born before.
The CEO of Twitter developed a video game at the age of 12
At nine, Musk received his first computer, a Commodore VIC-20. A manual was included that taught the BASIC computer language. Musk learned it in three days and was soon creating programs.
When Musk was 12 years old (1983), he came up with the source code for a video game called Blastar. The goal was to blow up as many alien freighters as possible with your five available ships.
The player had to dodge “deadly hydrogen bombs” and “state ray machines”. It was a game inspired, without a doubt, by the classic Space Invaders, which came out in 1978.
The code was published in an industry magazine called PC and Office Technology in 1984, and Musk received $500 for his efforts… but it never came to light. Not until this 2015.
Ashlee Vance, a technology journalist for Bloomberg, published a book on Elon Musk that included a photo of his code from that magazine. Tomas Lloret, a software engineer at Google, saw it and turned it into a game that anyone with an internet connection can play.
