Why can’t the genesis block coinbase be spent? According to the bitcoin wiki:


  The first 50BTC block reward went to address 1A1zP1eP5QGefi2DMPTfTL5SLmv7DivfNa, though this reward can't be spent due to a quirk in the way that the genesis block is expressed in the code (this may have been intentional).


But where is this quirk? How would you change it to allow it to be spent?
When a node starts up it initializes its copy of the block database alongside the genesis block and then begins the synchronization process. For some reason, Satoshi decided not to add the coinbase transaction from the genesis block to the global transaction database. Thus all the nodes in the network would reject the block.  

I'm not sure if this was done on purpose or if it was simply an oversight. In any event, it is forever bound to 1A1zP1eP5QGefi2DMPTfTL5SLmv7DivfNa.