#113 - Notes on Elon Musk and Linus Torvalds
Education Coffee is a 2xWeekly Newsletter on People, Ideas and Culture.
Why #LearningStories?
In 2020, I started a podcast called #LearningStories to understand how people acquired a set of skills and knowledge in a creative and innovative manner. In the process I hoped to uncover a new understanding of learning as conceptualized, narrated, and imagined by our guests. I recently completed #50 episodes and you can find the archives here.
I then started writing about the #LearningStories of individuals that have inspired me over time. I know I won’t be able to interview them on my podcast but I can research their lives and try my best to paint a portrait of how they learned and built their careers and lives over time. This a new series I hope to publish and release periodically through this newsletter. You can find other such posts in the archive section of my blog. Here is the learning story of two such individuals in the fields of entrepreneurship and technology.
Elon Musk Learning Story
Elon Reeve Musk (1971 to present) is a businessman known for his key roles in the payment company Paypal, in the space company SpaceX and the automotive company Tesla, Inc. In college he realized that the Internet, Space Exploration and Renewable Energy were the three fields that would have a huge influence on human kind. He created organizations to solve problems in these fields. He is also known for his ownership of X Corp. (formerly Twitter), Boring Company, xAI, Neuralink, and OpenAI.
Curiosity
Elon Musk was born in 1971 in Pretoria, South Africa to Maye (dietician) and Errol (engineer). He loved reading books as a student. He would spend a lot of time at bookstores and was very curious about how the world worked. At 10, he developed an interest in computing and video games, teaching himself how to program. At 12, he created a video game called Blastar that he sold to PC and Office Technology magazine for $500. In his late teens he immigrated to Canada. He spent time with his relatives and took up odd jobs while finishing school. He soon acquired its citizenship through his Canadian-born mother, Maye.
Competence
At 18, he enrolled at Queen’s University in Canada. Two years later Musk transferred to the University of Pennsylvania. By 24, he received a Bachelor of Science Degree in Physics and a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Economics. In college he realized that the Internet, Space Exploration and Renewable Energy were the three fields that would have a huge influence on human kind. He enrolled in a PhD Program in Applied Physics at Stanford University to answer some of the questions he had about these fields. He also wanted to move closer to Silicon Valley and the upcoming dot com boom.
Creation
He soon dropped out of the PhD program and co-founded the online city guide software company Zip2 with his brother Kimbal. The startup was acquired by Compaq for $307 million in 1999 and Musk received $22 million for his 7 percent share. That same year, Musk co-founded X.com, that offered its banking services only via the Internet, mobile app, email, and other electronic means. X.com merged with Confinity in 2000 to form PayPal. In 2002 eBay acquired PayPal for $1.5 billion of which Musk—PayPal’s largest shareholder with 11.7% of shares—received $176 million. In 2002, using $100 million of the money he made from the sale of PayPal, Musk founded SpaceX, a spaceflight services company. In 2003, he invested $6.35 million in Tesla and became one of its largest shareholders. In 2008, he became the CEO of Tesla, a manufacturer of electric cars and battery packs. He also invested and was part of companies like Starlink, Boring Company, xAI, Neuralink, x.com and OpenAI.
Notes and Reference
Linus Torvalds Learning Story
Linus Benedict Torvalds (1969 to present) is a Finnish software engineer who is the creator and lead developer of LINUX (inspired by his name). This is a free, open-source operating system (OS) that manages a computer’s memory and processes. He also created the distributed version control system Git, which he uses to manage the source code changes made to LINUX by thousands of open source developers. This is his #LearningStory.
Curiosity
Torvalds was born in Helsinki, Finland in 1969 to journalists Anna and Nils Torvalds. He is also the grandson of statistician Leo Törnqvist and of poet Ole Torvalds, and the great-grandson of journalist and soldier Toivo Karanko. In 1981, Torvalds (at the age of 12) got access to an 8 bit home computer called Commodore VIC-20. This sparked his interest in computers He started programming for it in BASIC. In 1984 he purchased another personal computer called Sinclair QL. He modified this computer extensively, especially its operating system. By 1988, he had already spent 7 to 8 years programming and learning about computers.
Competence
Torvalds studied computer science at the University of Helsinki from 1988 to 1996. He graduated with a master’s degree in computer science. His master’s thesis was titled Linux: A Portable Operating System. He bought computer science professor Andrew Tanenbaum’s book Operating Systems: Design and Implementation. During this time he learned everything he could about operating systems like MINIX and UNIX. An operating system (OS) is a software program that manages a computer’s resources and controls how information flows to and from the processor. UNIX was expensive in Finland and MINIX did not make the source code available for users. He wanted to solve this problem. He continued programming actively in this 8 year period of college and university.
Creation
In October 1991, he released the first official version of the LINUX Operating System. This was a new operating system from scratch that was based on both MINIX and UNIX. He made it available for free public use and released it under the GNU GPL License that was developed by Richard Stallman. The GNU General Public License (GPL) is a free software license that gives users the right to: Run the software, Study the software, Share the software, and Modify the software. This became the guiding philosophy of the Open Source Movement. Because of this very open licensing policy many programmers and developers around the world started contributing to make LINUX, a usable operating system. In 1996 he released version 2.0 of the LINUX operating system. In 2000, LINUX was installed and used as an operating system in seven million computers. He continues to work on the LINUX code actively as a member of the LINUX foundation. LINUX is one of the more popular operating systems used around the world. Here is TED Talk about his journey.
Notes and Reference
Abhishek