Elon Musk on building his first startup Zip2

November 11, 2024

In 1995, when he was just 23 years old, Elon dropped out of Stanford’s PhD program in physics to start Zip2 with his brother Kimbal Musk.

Elon personally wrote the first national maps, directions, yellow pages and white pages on the Internet that summer in C with a little C++.

In this CBS interview, a 27 year old Elon describes living in a $200/month office with a leaky roof:

“We found that an office was actually cheaper than apartment in Silicon Valley and we got this dinky little office that had a leaky roof. It was just the nastiest place you could imagine. I lived in it too and showered at the YMCA. This lasted for about three or four months, and the reason we chose this office — in addition to it being really cheap — was that there was an internet service provider on the floor below. So we were able to get really cheap internet access by drilling a hole in the floor and connecting to their server directly.”

In February 1999 — less than a year after this interview — Compaq would purchase Zip2 for $307 million in cash.

The interviewer also asks Elon what he thinks the future of the Internet will be, to which Elon responds:

“I think the internet is the superset of all media. It is the be all and end all of media. One will see print, broadcast, radio — essentially all media — folding into the internet. What the internet amounts to is it’s the first two-way communication medium that is intelligent. It allows consumers to choose what they want to see, when they want to see it.”

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