CEO funds academics based at SpaceX
Musk’s sons attend unorthodox school with about 40 students
For better or worse, Elon Musk often schools the masses on Twitter. He also helps school children at SpaceX — that is, he provides an education for them, apparently free of charge.
Musk’s sons go to the school, called Ad Astra, according to a new report that has shed more light on the school this week. And as you might imagine, Ad Astra — which operates in a corner at Musk’s space company in Hawthorne — is not your average school.
For one thing, there are no grades, Ars Technica reports. Also missing: music and sports, and language education reportedly “falls by the wayside.”
It does have a chemistry lab, Mac laptops for every child and food trucks for after school.
The school has not exactly been a secret. The guy who runs it, Joshua Dahn, talked with X Prize Foundation founder Peter
Diamandis in an interview that’s been on YouTube since last year.
Ad Astra is project-based, and has a curriculum that changes every year and that relies on student input. “Current projects include environmental policy, space exploration, and North Korea,” according to Ars Technica.
The school has operated for four years and has fewer than 40 students, including Musk’s five sons, kids of SpaceX employees and a few other children from Los Angeles.
Ars Technica obtained a 2015 tax filing with the IRS that shows Musk as the principal officer of the nonprofit school, and which states Ad Astra’s purpose: “The primary exempt purpose of this organization is to meet the specific education needs of children with extraordinary academic potential.”
The filing also goes into more detail about the school, such as that it is an elementary and middle school and places a “heavy emphasis” on science, math, engineering and ethics. It also never expects to grow to more than 50 students, according to the filing.
“The goal of the school is to develop remarkable people inbued (sic) with a strong sense of justice, who are equipped with the critical thinking skills necessary to make a difference,” the filing also states.
According to the filing, Musk gave Ad Astra $475,000 in 2014 and 2015. His contributions are treated as tuition-equivalent payments for his children who attend the school.
As for Musk’s own childhood and schooling, a biography of the billionaire businessman gives a mixed account.
Musk has a photographic memory and was a bookworm when he was growing up and going to school in South Africa, according to journalist Ashlee Vance’s “Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future,” which was published in 2015. Musk, his brother and sister and cousins grew up making rockets and dabbling in entrepreneurship. He was bright, but didn’t always get the best grades. But his obvious smarts and awkwardness seemed to contribute to him being bullied in school, which included a physical beating that sent him to the hospital.
“It was just like nonstop horrible” for a few years, Musk told Vance.
The “intense staff-to-student ratio” noted in Ad Astra’s filing may help prevent a repeat of what Musk had to go through.
Now the question is what will happen to the school as Musk’s sons age out. For example, two of his sons are 14 and will need to go on to high school, the Ars Technica report notes. Or will they? This is Musk, after all, and he might just find a way to keep them at Ad Astra.