In the summer of 1994, a 23-year-old Elon Musk spent his days in Los Gatos at Pinnacle Research Institute, dreaming up h | Hanami
In the summer of 1994, a 23-year-old Elon Musk spent his days in Los Gatos at Pinnacle Research Institute, dreaming up how ultracapacitors could power electric cars and even Star Wars–style laser guns. Then, around 5 p.m. every evening, he drove to Palo Alto for his second job at Rocket Science Games, a startup full of future legends, from Tony Fadell, who would later build the iPod, to the people behind Apple's QuickTime and engineers from Industrial Light & Magic.
They hired him to write the most boring code imaginable, drivers so joysticks and mice would work with games, but Elon quietly gave himself a much harder problem 😂: figuring out how a computer could run a game and stream video from a CD at the same time, something the machines of that era simply couldn't do.
Peter Barrett, one of the company's founders, remembered him as "completely unflappable," and said that after a while nobody was giving him directions at all, because he was just building what he wanted to build. Bruce Leak, who hired him, said: "He had boundless energy." So yeah, nobody handed Elon the big problem, he just went looking for it, at night, after a full day at another job. This is who Elon Musk is 💙