

He would build whatever suited the needs of fellow students – like a tricked-out gaming computer or a simple word processor, for example. He sold entire computers, as well as various hardware parts, from the comfort of his dorm room.

While at Queens University in Ontario, Musk had a profitable side hustle for a time.
#ELON MUSK PAYPAL EQUITY STAKE FULL#
To earn extra cash, Musk sold computer parts and full PCs out of his dorm room. Upon meeting them, he was so impressed with Elon - the geekier of the two brothers - that he became his mentor and offered him a summer internship at the bank for $14 an hour. One such businessman was Peter Nicholson, a top executive at the Bank of Nova Scotia, who was fascinated by the boys’ initiative. He landed an internship with the Bank of Nova Scotia by cold calling a top executive to meet for lunch.Īfter reuniting with his brother Kimbal in Canada, the two determined brothers researched businesspeople that they wanted to meet and took turns making cold calls to ask if they could have lunch. For $18 an hour - a great wage in 1989 - the grueling work involved wearing a hazmat suit, crawling through small spaces, and shoveling residue in extremely high-temperature conditions, according to Musk. After a visit to the unemployment office, he inquired about the job with the best wage, which turned out to be a gig cleaning the boiler room of a lumber mill. According to Ashlee Vance's biography on him, Musk first tended vegetables and shoveled out grain bins at a cousin’s farm in Waldeck, and then learned how cut logs with a chain saw in Vancouver. It was the first product Musk ever sold he reportedly called it a “trivial game… but better than Flappy Bird.” He once took a job as a boiler room cleaner at a lumber mill.Īfter leaving South Africa in 1988, Musk spent time working a series of odd jobs around Canada.
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He received $500 when the source code for the BASIC-based game was published in South African magazine PC and Office Technology. Musk had been interested in computers from an early age, and taught himself programming starting at 9-years-old. It was a space-themed game called Blastar, where the objective was to destroy an alien ship filled with weapons of mass destruction.
