What did Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Steve Wozniak do in their teenage years?

Living on $1 per day.

Reading 60 books per month.

Coding tic-tac-toe games.

Scoring 1590/1600 on SAT’s.

Writing payroll programs for companies.

The usual stuff that you tend not to do as a teenager.

Bill Gates has briefly had a net worth of $101 Billion while Elon has built 4 multi-billion dollar companies in his mid forties.

Bill and Elon were nowhere near normal as a teenager.

Here’s a quick rundown of some of the activities they got up to as teenagers.

Elon Musk:[1]

• Lived on $1 per day
• Read 60 books a month (Once he ran out of books he read the encyclopedia)
• Correcting his teachers (Musk was often way ahead of his teachers)
• Learning anything and everything[2]

Bill Gates:[3]

• Attending charity events with his Mother
• Hacking into school computer systems
• Hacking into computer manufacture’s systems
• Dropping out of college
• Playing Risk and Monopoly with his family (Winning a lot of the games)
• Falling out with his Co-Founder Paul Allen (Gates was banned from entering the computer labs at one point)
• Debugging systems (And hacking into them again later on)
• Scored 1590/1600 in his SAT’s

As you can see both Elon Musk and Bill Gates had far from “normal” teenage years.

I hope that gives some insights into what Elon and Bill were up to in their teenage years.

Footnotes

[1] How Elon Musk learns faster and better than everyone else

[2] How Elon Musk developed this "super power" to build successful companies - SmartCompany

[3] Bill Gates

Basically, Gates and Musk…and Zuck…and Bezos, along with everyone else we idolize in the Startup Universe mastered the grade school experience, as they were all either valedictorians, summa-cum laude, or just knew more than everyone, faculty and student body combined. They would treat high school as if it was a business and were ready to Monopolize…while sometimes already running a business….

The two facts about Elon I wanted to highlight from my last answer:

1. International video game sale of Blastar: the first Flappy Bird

Elon only received $500.00USD for his video game source code, but it was published and shared globally though PC Magazine…in 1984, when Elon is 12.This idea of sharing something useful is where magic happens…because today, Tesla patents are being shared at zero cost amongst automotive competitors…and they are THRIVING because of it, since Mercedes borrowed the powertrain system, Daimler/Chrysler uses the batteries, and Toyota essentially copied most of the motor itself.

2. Use of first principles: It’s about tough questions, not right answers

Elon’s fascination with the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is where he learned perspective is EVERYTHING, starting with the questions. If you get that, the rest is easier. He’s been building a tree of knowledge which grows fruit to change the future of humanity. (i.e. a First principle of Energy, it cannot be created nor destroyed. Branches of this “trunk” include only efficient forms of energy and consumption, being solar and electricity, in the leaves we find IP and in the fruit we find Tesla and Solar City, even Space-X).