site/components/elon.mdx

Elon Musk holds a special place amongst hackers. After growing up in a difficult
family situation in South Africa, working his way in small jobs until reaching
Los Angeles, teaching himself to code, and making hundreds of millions
co-founding PayPal, he kept on building.

It was a huge honor last month to have Elon [spend an hour in a Hack Club
AMA](https://youtu.be/riru9OzScwk)—at one point he remarked we were “asking
better questions than all the mainstream media.”

Afterwards, Elon wanted to support Hack Club further.

# Today, I’m proud to share: Elon Musk is donating $500,000 to Hack Club.

In so many ways, this is a milestone for every Hack Clubber. 6 years ago, I
started Hack Club as a 16-year-old programmer living on my own, scraping by,
barely able to make rent. Now Elon Musk is one of our largest supporters.

Elon is supporting us because we are a community of builders. When hackers see
problems in the world, we don’t blame someone else: we try to take them on
ourselves to solve. Elon is very selective about the nonprofits he supports and
I’m proud Hack Club is one of them.

So…how is Hack Club going to invest $500k? We want to use this to help 1000 more
students start and join Hack Clubs in their communities. For those already in
Hack Clubs, we look to you to help us make a more high-quality experience. We’re
a lot of what we’ve already been doing (and [what I wrote about at the beginning
of the year](https://zachinto2020.wordpress.com/2019/12/31/as-midnight-approaches/)):
we’ll spend as little money as possible at all times, and we’ll hire a small
number of diverse staff from video game engineers to media producers to make
Hack Club better. We are pushing hard now to expand users of [HCB](https://hackclub.com/hcb/),
and continuing to try and make the Hack Club Slack the best place to be a teenager on the intenet.

We’ll have a proper announcement in a few weeks, but one thing we’re doing after
winning the [Frank Grant](https://grant.frank.ly/) and now receiving Elon’s
gift, is open sourcing our finances. Hack Club HQ has been running on HCB
since February and starting today, you can see our account publicly at
https://hcb.hackclub.com/hq. You can track how we spend every single dollar of
Elon’s gift. Soon, we will also launch https://frank.ly/ on Hack Club’s
website.

Hack Club’s mission is to build a new generation of hackers. This starts in high
school, where Hack Club students learn to be technically proficient, build their
friend network, learn to raise and spend money, and develop into kind, curious,
thoughtful, optimistic, and honest leaders.

Elon Musk is now supporting you and your work, so go out and do amazing things.
Elon can’t wait to see what you make.

—Zach