The Blastar Blueprint: 12-Year-Old Elon’s First Enterprise
Long before he was launching rockets into orbit or redesigning global transit, Elon Musk was a quiet, intensely introverted 12-year-old growing up in Pretoria, South Africa. It was 1983, the dawn of the home computing era, and Elon had just managed to get his hands on a Commodore VIC-20.
While most kids used the machine to play basic arcade ports, Elon was captivated by how it worked. He hyper-focused on the manual, teaching himself how to code in BASIC in just a few days—a task that normally took months.
To test his new skills, he built a science-fiction arcade game called Blastar.
The Gameplay: Heavily inspired by Space Invaders, the player controlled a lone spaceship tasked with destroying an alien freighter loaded with “deadly hydrogen bombs and status beam status weapons.”
The Sale: Recognizing the value of his work, 12-year-old Elon sent the 167 lines of code to a South African trade magazine called PC and Office Technology.
The Profit: The magazine published the code in their 1984 issue and paid Elon $500 (equivalent to roughly $1,500 today). For a pre-teen in the early ’80s, it was a massive fortune and his very first taste of commercial success.
The Dark Side: Isolation and Survival at School
While Elon’s mind was thriving in the digital universe, his reality at school was incredibly bleak. He was the youngest, smallest, and most socially awkward boy in his class. He didn’t fit in with the hyper-masculine, sports-centric culture of South African schools at the time.
Instead of playing with classmates, Elon buried his face in books—frequently reading for 10 hours a day, devouring everything from encyclopedia sets to Marvel comic books and Isaac Asimov novels. This isolation made him an easy target.
