Elon Musk has long had a vision for schools. Learning should be interactive and “as close to a video game as possible,” he once said. Schools should let children go at their own pace, he has added, tailoring “the education to match their aptitudes and abilities.”
Since 2023, Mr. Musk has tried to build his dream of a better education at an elementary school in Bastrop, Texas, about a five-minute drive from some of his companies, including the rocket maker SpaceX.
The tech billionaire bought nearly two dozen acres of land and dispatched two top lieutenants to open the private school. Teachers across the country were interviewed, and some were hired for the institution, which would include prekindergarten through fifth or sixth grade. When the school — called Ad Astra, Latin for “to the stars” — opened enrollment for about 50 children last year, thousands applied.
“Everyone wants their kid to be like Elon Musk,” said Judah Ross, 37, a real estate agent in Bastrop who applied for his 3-year-old son.
But Ad Astra — in a white-columned house with a Texas flag, surrounded by a wrought-iron fence — appears to not be operating as an elementary school today.
Instead, it is a “licensed child care program” that oversees about 10 children ages 5 and under, according to documents obtained from the Texas Health and Human Services Commission, a state agency that regulates such programs. Ad Astra has two caregivers, serves graham crackers and apples for snacks, and has nap schedules where “the children had their own cots, with their names on them,” a state report from January said.
“The operation does not care for school-age children,” the report added.
Billionaires including Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and LeBron James have worked on creating their own schools. Some have succeeded, some not. But Ad Astra’s turn toward a day care caps a more than $600 million effort by Mr. Musk to disrupt education — only to seemingly be schooled himself.
Mr. Musk, the father of at least 14 children, has tried since 2021 to open elementary schools, a high school and a university, according to state documents and interviews with nine people close to his efforts. The 54-year-old, who leads companies like Tesla, has gotten three schools off the ground, but two have closed or shrunk and a third moved online. The university does not appear to be progressing.
Mr. Musk’s own children are likely not at Ad Astra in Bastrop. He and his partner, Shivon Zilis, with whom he has at least four children, have told people that they are home-schooling their kids, two people with knowledge of the matter said.
Billionaires tend to underestimate the challenges of opening a school, said Larry Cuban, an emeritus professor of education at Stanford. “They think they understand what teaching is all about and what schooling is all about because they’ve experienced it themselves,” he said.
Ad Astra may still grow, not unlike how Mr. Musk’s businesses often start small before flourishing. Mr. Musk, who advised President Trump and worked on his artificial intelligence start-up, xAI, this year, did not return requests for comment.
For more than a decade, Mr. Musk has talked about opening a school where children can focus on their singular interests. At his ideal school, teaching would be interactive, he said in an interview last year with the Milken Institute, a nonprofit think tank.
His first school — also called Ad Astra — opened in 2014 at SpaceX’s headquarters at the time in Hawthorne, Calif., near Los Angeles. It had roughly 50 students, half of them related to SpaceX employees, according to a podcast interview in 2022 with Josh Dahn, who co-founded the school with Mr. Musk.
Mr. Musk sent his five children from his first marriage to Justine Musk to the school, pulling them out of Mirman School, a private elementary school in the wealthy Bel Air neighborhood, Mr. Dahn said in the podcast interview.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, the school shifted to virtual classes and made them available to the public. Control of the school was later transferred to a charity that Mr. Dahn set up, according to tax documents. Mr. Dahn did not respond to a request for comment.
In 2021, Mr. Musk posted online — seemingly in jest — that he planned to start a university with a specific acronym. “Am thinking of starting new university: Texas Institute of Technology & Science,” he wrote. “It will have epic merch.”
That year, Jared Birchall, Mr. Musk’s chief personal adviser, established a nonprofit called the Foundation aimed at founding an independent primary school, high school and university. Mr. Musk donated $100 million to the organization, which said in a 2023 tax filing that it would “create schools dedicated to STEM education at the highest levels.”
The Musk Foundation, Mr. Musk’s main charity, has given the Foundation about $607 million since 2022. Mr. Birchall did not respond to a request for comment.
But by 2023, the Foundation’s documents stopped detailing plans to create a university. A spokesman for the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges, where the Foundation had said it planned to seek accreditation for a university, said it had “been unable to find any communications from Mr. Musk related to the accreditation of his proposed university.”
Mr. Musk focused instead on schools in Texas, where he had moved in 2020 from California.
He soon created a new Ad Astra school at SpaceX’s launch site in south Texas. Tax documents for Ad Astra in 2021 show plans for a kindergarten and elementary and middle school in Texas.
Yet by early last year, the south Texas school appeared closed to the public. It’s unclear if it remains open to SpaceX employees.
Mr. Musk’s newest Ad Astra school in Bastrop, surrounded by farmland and cow pastures, intended to follow a Montessori-style curriculum, a child-centered educational approach that is popular among preschools, according to state documents. The school planned for 54 students and full-time faculty.
Mr. Birchall and Jehn Balajadia, a longtime lieutenant of Mr. Musk’s, were placed in charge of Ad Astra, according to the state records. Teachers were contacted and interviewed for jobs. One general studies teacher, who was not authorized to speak publicly, was told that the school would employ dozens of teachers.
But Ad Astra ran into hiccups, according to state documents. It had to resubmit its application for a permit to operate a child care program and also handle paperwork for a staff member who did not have the education credits for “director qualifications.” The school’s opening was delayed at least twice, according to emails to parents viewed by The New York Times.
In October 2024, school officials held an informational Zoom meeting to give parents “an overview of the curriculum and students’ expected learning outcomes,” according to an email sent to parents.
School officials described Ad Astra as focusing on STEM and flexibility, like science classes outdoors, parents said. There would be horses and chickens to take care of.
Tuition would be about $1,000 a month, and there would be mixed grade levels, said Mr. Ross, the real estate agent, who attended the Zoom session. Other parents said the school planned to interview each student separately, and they were told that Mr. Musk’s employees would not be given preference. Parents would have to sign a nondisclosure agreement if their child was admitted.
Mr. Ross said he had fielded calls from all over the country from people interested in moving to Bastrop for their children to attend Ad Astra. When his son was declined admittance, Mr. Ross received an email from Ad Astra’s administrator, Greg Marick, who said the school had received “thousands of applications and inquiries for just a few dozen spots.”
“We are touched by the community’s interest in our new school for the next generation of problem solvers and builders,” wrote Mr. Marick, an educator who helped open a school on the Hawaiian island of Lanai. (Lanai is owned by the billionaire Larry Ellison, a friend of Mr. Musk’s.)
A person who answered a phone number attached to Mr. Marick said he was no longer involved with the school.
On a recent afternoon visit to Ad Astra, there was little activity visible. Two cars were parked out front. Security instructed a Times reporter to leave and declined to pass on a message to school officials.
Zarema Saldana, 33, a baker in Austin, about 45 minutes from Bastrop, said she had applied for her two daughters to enroll in Ad Astra and never heard back. Her girls would have been ideal candidates, she said, as they speak Russian and take ballet and gymnastics.
She was surprised to learn Ad Astra was serving only younger children, after hearing about the curriculum and other details related to a larger school.
“They had really big plans,” she said.
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