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Elon Musk had a question: “Does anybody have any experience with first principles analysis?” He was speaking to a room full of kids, many of whom knew Musk as the CEO of companies that made rockets and cool-looking cars—and as the founder of Ad Astra, the microschool they attended in his Bel Air mansion, per a video posted by the YouTube channel Newsthink. To five of them, he was simply “Dad.”
In 2014, Musk reportedly pulled his children out of the elite Mirman School in Los Angeles and recruited one of their teachers to help him build an alternative school unbound by conventional curriculum standards. Students at Ad Astra studied nuclear chemistry in middle school, completed independent engineering projects, and listened to lectures from successful tech executives between classes. Kierra Wang, who says she attended Ad Astra’s middle school at the same time as Musk’s triplets, recalls entering college-level hackathons by eighth grade. She credited Ad Astra with giving her not just the knowledge to compete with kids much older than her but also the “gall and confidence” to lie about her age to get in.
With Ad Astra, Musk became an early pioneer in the emerging microschooling movement. Loosely defined as schools with fewer than 150 students, microschools often operate for profit, and outside the regulatory frameworks that govern traditional public schools. According to a 2024 RAND estimate, somewhere between 750,000 and 2.1 million students in the US are being educated in some form of microschool. Silicon Valley is playing an integral role.
As he has had more children, Musk has expanded his educational footprint, funding a venture led by a California-based company called Xplor Education to create a Montessori-style school in Bastrop, Texas, where several of Musk’s companies are based. His efforts have helped inspire other members of the tech elite to follow suit. Xplor also helped open a Montessori preschool on the Hawaiian island of Lanai, which is largely owned by Larry Ellison, the billionaire cofounder of Oracle. One Lanai local said that Ellison’s own children are enrolled there.
In 2023 the investors Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel reportedly took to the stage at the exclusive Sun Valley conference in Idaho to urge fellow tech heavyweights to homeschool their children. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and AngelList cofounder Naval Ravikant have helped fund alternative education companies.
Even billionaires on the more liberal end of the political spectrum, like Netflix cofounder Reed Hastings and Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates, have established themselves as major donors in the school-choice movement, which aims to redirect tax dollars toward options beyond traditional public schools. (They would be wise to try to learn from other moguls’ efforts, like Mark Zuckerberg’s $100 million attempt to reform the public school system in Newark, New Jersey, or the upcoming shuttering of the two San Francisco Bay Area schools he helped open for low-income families.)
The push for education alternatives appeals to Silicon Valley parents on a number of levels. Many are autodidacts who struggled with the social expectations of a traditional school environment. Others looked over their kids’ shoulders during Covid-era Zoom schooling and didn’t like what they saw. Tech elites who grew increasingly alienated from so-called “woke” culture began seeking fresh options that felt more politically and culturally aligned.
Silicon Valley parents are looking at traditional educational institutions and thinking, “This is ridiculous. Why would we do things the old fashioned way?” says Michael Strong, the founder of the alternative education program The Socratic Experience. He explains that many believe their high-achieving children are being held back by rigid curricula that don’t allow for accelerated learning. “The idea is, if kids can learn faster in two hours, why not?” says Strong.
