Kairan Quazi is only 14
Musk signs prodigy for SpaceX
06/12/2023, 12:47 p.m
Kairan Quazi is no ordinary teenager. The 14-year-old is smarter than 99.9 percent of all people and already has a degree in computer science and engineering under his belt. Even tech billionaire Musk seems to have been impressed.
Other teenagers his age are just out of middle school in the US. Not so Kairan Quazi. The 14-year-old will soon be starting his first job. The child prodigy has been signed by the private space company SpaceX by tech billionaire Elon Musk.
In a Linkedin post, Quazi writes: “Next stop: SpaceX! I’ll be joining the coolest company in the world as a software engineer on the Starlink development team. One of the few companies that doesn’t see my age as an arbitrary and outdated measure of maturity and ability.” The SpaceX project Starlink is working to build a global satellite network that will provide Internet access even to remote locations.
It was clear early on that Quazi’s life would not take an ordinary course. According to the “LA Times”, he is said to have spoken in complete sentences at the age of two and told educators and children about the news he heard on the radio. In the third grade, an IQ test confirmed that he was smarter than 99.9 percent of all people. He finally started programming at the age of seven.
He eventually began attending a community college when he was nine, according to the newspaper, before transferring to Santa Clara University when he was eleven. There he studied computer science and engineering. During his studies, Quazi made a list of companies he wanted to apply for an internship at.
Only Lama Nachman from Intel Labs answered him and asked him for an internship as an AI research fellow at Intel Labs. “In a sea of so many naysayers from Silicon Valley’s vaunted companies, this ONE executive said yes… a door opened… and changed everything,” Quazi writes on LinkedIn.
This month he is leaving the university as the youngest graduate in the past 200 years. “I think my college years were the happiest years of my life because I really had a lot of autonomy to gain experience,” Quazi said. Working at Starlink now gives him the opportunity to be a part of something bigger than himself.
According to the newspaper, the 14-year-old plans to move to Washington from the US state of California with his mother for his new job. However, as a minor and a school-age child, he is allowed to work a maximum of eight hours a week there. That’s a far cry from the 80 hours a week that Musk sometimes requires of his employees.