Did Elon Musk Really Code? Uncovering the Billionaire’s Early Programming Journey

Elon Musk began programming at the age of ten, captivated by a 5 KB Commodore VIC computer his father bought for him. He taught himself BASIC from a manual in under three days, a task that typically takes months.

At twelve, Musk wrote a simple game called Blastar in just 167 lines of code, which he sold for $500 to a computer magazine, marking his first commercial success.

His programming continued into his entrepreneurial ventures. After moving to Canada and later studying economics and physics at the University of Pennsylvania, Musk co‑founded Zip2 in 1995, where he wrote backend code in C for an online city guide service.

Although later engineers rewrote much of the code for scalability, Musk’s early contributions were crucial to Zip2’s growth, which was eventually sold to Compaq.

He then invested the proceeds into X.com, an online banking startup that later merged with Confinity to become PayPal; again, Musk played a key role in developing the original codebase.

From there, Musk shifted focus to founding Tesla and SpaceX, stepping back from hands‑on programming but leveraging his technical foundation to drive these companies forward.

In summary, Musk is a self‑taught programmer who used his coding abilities to launch and grow several groundbreaking businesses, even though he is not considered a world‑class software engineer.