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Elon Musk is mostly known for his successful businesses and unique thinking capabilities. He has come a long way from a teenage self-taught coder and space science enthusiast to the richest person in the world.
His revolutionized ideas are going to change the future. Zip2, X.com, Tesla, SpaceX, Nuralink, Hyperloop — none of these were a THING before he started doing it. He was a prodigy and a well-practiced problem solver. After reaching such heights, we might not remember him as a programmer, which is what he started his journey as. Let's have a look at his journey with programming.
How Did Elon Musk Start Programming?
Elon is a self-learned programmer who started programming at the age of only 10. So, he was visiting an electronics store and was fascinated by a Commodore VIC-20 with a 5KB memory computer and asked his father to get him one.
Despite being so young, he learned the BASIC programming language from the workbook he got with the computer, after working with it for three days straight, staying awake for two nights. A course that was supposed to take six months to learn. At the age of 12, he made a game, Blastar, and later sold it to a computer magazine company for $500 who published the code's printed copy.
Did Elon Have A Career In Programming?
Elon Musk never had a solid stand on the corporate jobs. He was always an entrepreneurial thinker. However, he worked at a rocket science tech firm in Silicon Valley in his early days but did not continue for his own potential ventures.
How Good Was Elon at Programming?
He is a self-taught programmer and while his programming skills may not be as proficient as the top programmers, yet, he knows Java, Python, C, Perl, Shell, ML stacks, and wrote OpenAI libraries.
Elon and his brother founded Zip2 in 1995, a directory service that he wrote most of the code for, but his code was not polished enough to be called the finest. So, the hired coders had to rewrite the code because of the methodologies used by Musk.
Then he founded X.com and also had contributions in the software development for their services.
Favorite Programming Languages?
Elon knows a lot of programming languages even though he is not a programmer by profession and his degrees were in math and physics.
Python, Java, C, C++ are some of his most used programming languages. Even in his companies, at Tesla, SpaceX, Nuralink vast portion of the codes are written in python and C++. For example, Tesla used python for the autopilot feature of vehicles which was later converted into C++ for a better time cycle.
Does Elon Code For His Companies Upto This Day?
Not really. Elon has turned himself more into business now. He did a great job in his initial companies to make his mark with his programming expertise. Now, he has bigger things to focus on.
He is a critical thinker who loves experimenting with technology. His employees do the heavy lifting now with those computers and he works on expanding the ideas he has and getting into new projects which he loves.
Many of the CEOs of successful tech companies do not know to code and that should not be a concern for people if they have great ideas to work on and Elon is the mirror to that. The most successful businessman on the planet and one of a kind.