Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk has revealed that his love for programming stemmed from playing video games.
The business magnate, who just recently overtook Bill Gates to be the 2nd richest individual, told that his love for technology and coding all stemmed from his passion for video games.
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,” he said, as quoted by inc.com.
His love for video games began on a trip to the United States aged 10, at a hotel with a lot of arcade games. That encouraged him to start coding, and at the tender age of 12 he sold his first PC game Blastar for USD 500.
Since then, he has gone from strength to strength, founding a yellow pages company called Zip2, which he sold to Compaq for USD 307 million. Musk used the funds from that sale to co-found X.com, which after a merger eventually became PayPal, which then sold to eBay in 2002 for USD 1.5 billion.
His entire journey from a curious kid who liked video games, to the co-founder of arguably one of the biggest companies, begs the question of the less talked about positive impact of video games.
While this might come as a surprise to a lot of parents, video games are helpful in the development of cognitive and intellectual abilities of an individual, and might actually go a long way in their overall personality development.
