Want to be the next Musk, Bezos? Become a bookworm.  

By Alec Hogg

For years, the world's most successful investor Warren Buffett has been banging on about the value of reading. He is a very public example of the potency of books. Not so well known is that two super entrepreneurs busy re-shaping our world were both nerdy bookworms as children.

South Africa's most famous entrepreneurial export, Elon Musk, spent his youth consuming books at such a rate that he ran out of options at the local library. So he decided to read right through the family's Encyclopaedia Britannica – twice. That early exposure shaped a mind that is today transforming the transport, space and solar power industries – and won't stop innovating until he's put a man on Mars.

Space race competitor Jeff Bezos of Amazon is like Musk's brother from another mother. A devoted bookworm, in Grade Four (age 9) he got so excited by a contest being run by his school that he ploughed through 30 books in a single year. Favourite among them was the classic and decidedly grown-up science fiction novel, A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle.

Buffett says there is much we can learn from those who lived before us. Their wisdom is easily accessible, anytime, in books. Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos keep proving his point.