SpaceX founder & Tesla CEO Elon Musk donated $1 Million to Hack Club, a nonprofit organization dedicated to support teen coding programs around the globe. Hack Club helps high school students learn about computer/machine programming through building projects. Hack Club founder Zach Latta told Hack Club students that Musk’s generous donation will help fund more projects. “Elon is now supporting you and your work, so go forth and do amazing things. We can’t wait to show Elon what you make,” they stated in the organization's announcement this week.
“This gift will help launch a number of ideas we've been discussing, including helping more in-person hackathons get off the ground, providing more direct 1:1 [one-on-one] technical support on the Hack Club Slack, and starting up cool new projects like The Hacker Zephyr. We also want to use his gift to help 1,000 more teenagers start and join Hack Clubs in their towns,” Latta wrote.
The ‘Hacker Zephyr’ is a project that took place in July 2021, during which Hack Club members chartered a train to travel across America with dozens of students. Their goal was to host the “world's longest hackathon on land - 3,502 miles long.” They started from Hack Club headquarters in Burlington, Vermont to SpaceX in California. The organization shared that some Hack Club members met with SpaceX engineers this year, who demonstrated some engineering projects at SpaceX's headquarters in Hawthorne, California.
“We will be spending every dollar as wisely as possible, growing thoughtfully, and adding diverse staff to make Hack Club better. We are pushing hard to try and make the Hack Club Slack the best place to be a teenager on the internet and expanding Hack Club Bank,” they said. Slack is where the students can discuss their projects through video calls, and the ‘Hacker Club Bank' is where the non-profit organizes its funds to help club members purchase equipment needed for coding projects.
Because our finances are fully transparent, you'll be able to see how we spend every cent of Elon's gift: https://t.co/Oyk7tbsFdV
— Hack Club (@hackclub) October 8, 2021
Learning how computers work and how to program a variety of applications can help students develop their problem-solving skills. Schools are welcome to join Hack Club’s global network through its official website – hackclub.com – to support STEM education and enable students to learn how to develop websites, apps, games, among other fun projects. A lot of things we all use daily need programming to function, from mobile phones to kitchen appliances, even SpaceX rockets, and Tesla cars are programmed to run on code!
Musk is an avid supporter of educational organizations, last year in March he donated $500,000 to Hack Club and also spent some time answering student questions, video linked below. He even jokingly encouraged them to try to hack SpaceX’s broadband network of internet-beaming satellites and the ‘Tesla Mothership!’
Last year, Elon joined us for an AMA (https://t.co/FDPxnkmz3q) and gave $500k. It's hard to overstate the impact his gift had on Hack Club. Our community doubled in size almost overnight. pic.twitter.com/kpIAmm6Im1
— Hack Club (@hackclub) October 8, 2021
VIDEO: 2020 Hack Club Students Ask Elon Musk Questions
Featured Image Source: Negative Space via Pexels
About the Author
Evelyn Arevalo
Evelyn J. Arevalo joined Tesmanian in 2019 to cover news as a Space Journalist and SpaceX Starbase Texas Correspondent. Evelyn is specialized in rocketry and space exploration. The main topics she covers are SpaceX and NASA.
