A rare video featuring Elon Musk’s secretive and exclusive Ad Astra school was recently shared online. The video also included an interesting segment featuring the SpaceX CEO discussing first principles thinking to children in a class.
Ad Astra is a lab school that Musk created for his children with the help of education veteran Josh Dan. Dan would later go on to become the founder of Astra Nova School and the co-founder of Synthesis, an online program that adopts the educational principles of Ad Astra. Unlike traditional schools, Ad Astra has no grade levels and adopts a problem-focused approach.
The school has had a couple of other sites in the past, from SpaceX’s headquarters in Hawthorne, California to one of Musk’s own homes in Bel-Air. Today, Ad Astra is in Starbase, Texas, the site of Musk’s Starship factory. A video posted on YouTube from Newsthink shared some clips of Starbase’s Ad Astra school, which seems like a place that’s very conducive to learning.
Interestingly enough, Newsthink was able to acquire footage of Elon Musk lecturing some of Ad Astra’s students about first principles thinking. The clip was short, but it provided a glimpse at the level of thinking that the school really requires from its students. It’s a very compelling clip, as it showed that the SpaceX CEO does not oversimplify concepts, even if he’s addressing actual children.
Josh Dan, who co-founded Ad Astra, noted that Elon Musk was very particular about the school’s students being exposed to real-world problems and solutions. Dan noted that some of the kids’ problems involved practical issues, such as the rollout of Tesla’s Supercharger Network in another country. Since such problems have a lot of solutions, students could then learn to reason.
Watch Newsthink‘s feature on Elon Musk’s Ad Astra School in the video below.
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