Before Tesla, SpaceX or a trillion-dollar fortune, Elon Musk was a 12-year-old in South Africa with a home computer and a game he had written himself. He sold that game, called Blastar, to a computer magazine for about $500.
A boy with a computer
Musk was born on June 28, 1971, in Pretoria, South Africa, the oldest of three children. His father, Errol, was an engineer and his mother, Maye, was born in Canada. His parents divorced in 1979, and he chose to live with his father.
Blastar was a space shooter written in BASIC, an early beginner-friendly programming language. In 1983 he sold it to PC and Office Technology magazine. It was a small payment, but it was real money for a first piece of software.
Pretoria to Penn
In the late 1980s Musk left South Africa for Canada, where his mother was born. He stayed with a second cousin in Saskatchewan and worked a series of jobs before starting at Queen’s University in Ontario in 1990. In 1992 he moved to the University of Pennsylvania, where he later earned degrees in physics and economics.
He then went to Stanford to study physics, but left after two days. In 1995 he started Zip2, a web software company, with his brother Kimbal and Greg Kouri.
Our take: Blastar is a great detail, but it was a small win, not the start of an empire. What it does show is early skill with code at a time when home computers were still rare. It also fits the bigger picture in our look at how self-made his story really is: real talent, and a start with more help than the garage myth suggests. The big jump came years later, with Zip2 and everything after it.
