You can learn nearly everything about Elon Musk in a single moment. The year is 1995. One of the world’s most esteemed universities, Stanford University, has accepted him into a PhD program in applied physics. After arriving and taking a look around, he disappears two days later. Not because he didn’t succeed. Not because he was incapable of doing it. since he had somewhere more fascinating to be.
Musk has always viewed formal education as a starting point rather than a destination, as evidenced by that decision, which was both impulsive and obviously intentional.
He was raised in a comfortable but complex home in Pretoria, South Africa. Due to the Musk family’s wealth, young Elon had access to books, which he reportedly devoured at a rate that startled those around him. He used the VIC-20 computer’s user manual to teach himself how to program. He wrote the video game Blastar by the time he was twelve, and he sold it to a magazine for about $500. That is not information that is buried in a footnote. Really, that’s the entire story in miniature.
His time in South Africa for formal education was a challenging experience. Despite graduating from Pretoria Boys High School, he wasn’t particularly remarkable for someone who would go on to become the richest person in the world. In Afrikaans, he scored 61 out of 100. In senior math, he received a B. He was hospitalized as a result of severe bullying. The notion that the credentials did not foretell the result is a subtly significant aspect of all of this.
He left South Africa at the age of seventeen, in part to avoid having to serve in the military, in part because Canada provided a path to North America, and in part, it seems, because he had always been directed in a different direction. Before enrolling at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, in 1990, he traveled to Canada, made contact with distant relatives, and worked odd jobs at a farm and a lumber mill. Musk himself hardly ever thinks back on those years, and it was a reasonable but unremarkable path.
He does discuss his time at the University of Pennsylvania, where he transferred in 1992 and remained until 1995. There, he obtained two bachelor’s degrees: a Bachelor of Science in Physics from the College of Arts and Sciences and a Bachelor of Arts in Economics from the Wharton School. The combination is more important than it first appears. He developed what he has called “first-principles thinking” as a result of physics, which is the practice of dissecting issues into their most basic parts rather than drawing conclusions from analogies. He had a framework for comprehending why businesses succeed or fail thanks to economics. It’s important to consider whether SpaceX and Tesla would have been possible without both of those mental tools operating simultaneously.
In order to help pay for his tuition, he reportedly threw big, ticketed parties at his off-campus home. He also wrote a business plan for an electronic book scanner that was almost ten years ahead of Google Books. It’s unclear if that speaks more about his foresight or practicality.
Stanford followed, followed by the exit. Depending on who is telling the story, he enrolled in a graduate program in materials science in 1995. Over time, there has been some disagreement regarding the specifics. It’s undeniable that he left almost immediately to co-found Zip2, a web software company, because he didn’t want to watch the internet boom from a seminar room. In the end, the business was purchased for more than $300 million.
Looking back, it’s difficult to ignore the fact that Musk continued to approach education even after he dropped out. When building SpaceX, he reportedly studied aerospace engineering textbooks and had direct conversations with professionals, effectively teaching himself rocket science through sheer perseverance. It’s still unclear if that’s genius, stubbornness, or both. However, it implies that for Musk, the classroom was frequently not the most effective option and was always just one of many.
Since then, he has established Ad Astra, a small, private school for his own children that emphasizes problem-solving over memorization and lacks traditional grade levels in order to make the relevance of knowledge seem immediate and genuine. You get the impression that, in creating it, he was reversing something he had personally gone through—that, as he once described it, attending school as a child “was torture.” From a man who opted to spend two days at Stanford instead of none at all, that is a powerful statement.
