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- Geography
Elon Musk, the business magnate, most entrepreneurs look up to for inspiration, is a coder first. Saying that he owns companies like SpaceX, Tesla, Neuralink, SolarCity, Hyperloop, and OpenAI, perhaps would be an understatement. He is considered by many as a demigod of entrepreneurship, a visionary investor, and a disruptor. All the companies he founded have impacted every related segment of the industry in a significant way. Considering the way, he nurtured AI and has been an ardent supporter of artificial intelligence, there shouldn't be an iota of doubt that he was passionate about coding. Elon Musk's devotees on quora are right when they say, "You don't get that kind of success with SpaceX or Tesla by being like the average coders". We can understand his passion for coding and programming languages if we can dig into his antecedents.
Elon's tryst with coding began very early in his life. At the very young age of 10, he taught himself BASIC in three days straight, that too in the pre-internet era. He developed a video game BLASTER at the age of 12 and sold the programming code to a PC magazine for $500 and got it published. He has two bachelor's degrees in Physics and one Economics degree, which he likes to dispossess as he seems to not have much faith in college education. "I think college is basically for fun and to prove that you can do your chores, but they're not for learning," Musk said. His internships at Silicon Valley pushed him further into programming and the technology business to start a software company with his brother. Since then, there was no looking back, and strangely, unlike any star executive, he expresses his opinion on programming languages on different online forums. Though his focus has recently shifted to the crypto market, till recently he was pretty much deliberating over different features of programming languages. There are few languages that he finds useful, and which have been put to use by his technical teams.
It is a middle-level language as it combines the features of both low-level and high-level languages, allowing developers to script for drivers and kernels along with software programming. C has direct access to machine-level components including compilers, and hardware APIs, and has dynamic memory allocation making an optimum choice for scripting, and probably for its via media approach Elon must have developed a liking for it.
Java has a unique compilation paradigm that other programming languages lack. Compiled languages such as C++ cannot be run on all devices whereas Java is compiled into bytecode to run on any machine with the help of Java Virtual Machine (JVM). Being a widely operable language, it has been patronized by most software executives and Elon Musk is not an exception.
Python language is widely known for its versatility and its applications in machine learning-based technologies. Tesla, the trademark product of Elon Musk's entrepreneurial and innovative capabilities, has a Python-run OS. Though there are few rumors of its obsolescence for Tesla doing rounds, it still holds a place as Elon Musk's pet language.
When, Jackson Palmer, the CEO of Elon's favorite cryptocurrency Dogecoin commented in an interview that Elon is a grifter and doesn't understand coding as well he makes out, Elon gave Palmer an apt reply, asking him to share the script online that he said Elon couldn't get the gist of. Certainly, Elon has a point here. Though many of us would undercut it as a vague reply, there is very much possible that he is an aficionado of clean code.
