Elon Musk’s Ad Astra: The Latest Trend in Celebrity-Run Experimental Schools

If you’re unsure about getting one of Elon Musk’s chips implanted in your brain, there is an
alternative option: enrolling your child in the billionaire’s experimental new school. According to The Guardian, applications are now being accepted for Ad Astra, which is designed for children between the ages of three and nine in Bastrop, Texas, close to a SpaceX facility. With only 48 spots available, the competition is intense, especially considering that Musk’s own children will likely occupy several of those spots.

Musk’s educational venture began ten years ago. In 2014, he took his five children out of their prestigious private school in Los Angeles and placed them in a SpaceX conference room with some colleagues’ children and a tutor. In a 2015 interview, Musk voiced his dissatisfaction with traditional schools and his ambition to test his innovative ideas. His curriculum involved robot battles with flamethrowers but omits music, sports, and languages, as he believes computers will manage these activities in the future.

Another groundbreaking concept from Musk is to have “all children progress through the same grade simultaneously, like an assembly line.” Pleased with the outcomes, he intends to establish a university, likely focusing on combating what he refers to as the “woke mind virus.”

Musk is not the first public figure to explore education. Personalized schools have become a new symbol of status, with individuals like Mark Zuckerberg, Will Smith, Pitbull, and Oprah Winfrey founding their own educational initiatives.

However, many of these schools have encountered significant obstacles. For instance, Kanye West’s Donda Academy faced multiple lawsuits over claims that students could only eat sushi and had to sit on the floor. Adam Neumann’s WeGrow, a $42,000-per-year private school, abruptly shut down around the time WeWork collapsed. Nonetheless, there are plans to revive it as Student of Life for Life, or SOLFL, pronounced “soulful,” which unfortunately sounds more like “awful.”