The schools trying to teach America's kids to think like Elon Musk
A “conundrum” that asks young school children whether humans would be better off being governed by an AI overlord. Another that revolves around the ethics of rigging an arcade game to make it unwinnable. And a third scenario on a company that uses its products to illicitly gather data from conversations its customers have in their homes.
These are some of the “open-ended” questions — intended to have no right or wrong answers — that an Elon Musk-linked online education program poses to elementary and middle school-aged children. The Astra Nova School, a nonprofit built out of a school founded by Musk a decade ago, has spent the last few years churning out online curriculum with the goal of teaching American children to think more like Musk.
Josh Dahn, the co-founder of Astra Nova, has marketed the education initiatives by tying them to Musk and his companies. Dahn has criticized traditional forms of education for failing to prepare children to “work for or compete with someone like Elon someday.”
Musk’s initial foray into education
A Teach for America alumnus, Dahn met Musk in 2013 while teaching fourth graders at the Mirman School, an elite private school in Los Angeles where some of Musk’s children were enrolled. Musk — dissatisfied with Mirman’s approach to education — approached Dahn about forming a more exclusive, specialized school for his children and the children of employees at his rocket company SpaceX. After several meetings with Justine Musk, Musk's first wife and mother to six of his children, Dahn co-founded the Ad Astra school in the fall of 2014. Ad Astra began its classes in a conference room inside SpaceX’s headquarters in Hawthorne, California. As the number of students grew, Ad Astra moved its classrooms to a Bel-Air mansion before returning to the SpaceX campus.
Musk shuttered Ad Astra in 2020 when he relocated his business empire to Texas. Dahn, meanwhile, spun off parts of the school into a nonprofit called Astra Nova, an “experimental online school” that enrolls children ages 10-15. “Ad Astra [became] Astra Nova, it’s the same team,” Dahn said in a 2024 interview.
On August 16, 2021, Musk transferred $1.4 million in assets connected to Ad Astra’s California operations to the newly formed Astra Nova School foundation, according to publicly available records.
Musk has since founded a new Ad Astra school near his multi-use compound in Bastrop County, Texas. SpaceX filed a permit last month to build another Ad Astra school in Brownsville, Texas.
Teaching children to think like Musk
While Dahn has said Musk is not directly involved in Astra Nova, the school’s philosophy is built in Musk’s image. “[Musk] could go into meetings and collaborate with employees, audit their reasoning, [and] communicate priorities, even when he didn't have all the context,” Dahn said in a 2021 social media post on his approach to education. “How can kids learn that skill?”
The centerpiece of Astra Nova’s curriculum is a series of ethical conundrums presented in animated videos and shared online. The conundrums appear in Astra Nova’s classrooms, and prospective students must answer at least one to apply to the school. They have also been viewed millions of times through Astra Nova’s partnership with ClassDojo, an online educational platform that purports to be used in 95% of U.S. schools.
Early versions of the conundrums pulled directly from issues related to Musk’s businesses. One asked: “How should [Tesla] approach building out a supercharger network in South America?"
Dahn has said the conundrums are “open-ended questions” that provide enough ambiguity to create “space for critical disagreement and constructive disagreement” between “classmates and hopefully with their teacher.”
One conundrum poses a scenario in which a candidate for elected office promises to serve as a puppet ruler on behalf of “AVONA,” an AI overlord trained on past human governments. “ANOVA will make every decision, no matter how small,” the narrator asks. “So, would you consider voting for this AI-powered politician? … Are you Team Yes or Team No?”
In a separate video, Astra Nova asks students whether an arcade claw machine game rigged to prevent users from ever winning a prize is criminal. Another conundrum weighs the permissibility of a pet hotel planting sensors on animals to surreptitiously collect data from their owners, which the company then sells to fuel its global expansion.
An “unapologetically elitist” approach to AI education
Another educational initiative derived from Dahn’s work with Musk is Synthesis, an online subscription-based service for kids ages six to 14. Co-founded by Dahn in 2020, Synthesis offers parents educational video games and an AI-powered “superhuman math tutor.” The company advertises its AI learning application as “warm, patient and encouraging” and promises an almost human touch. "Your child will feel like they're learning with a real teacher," reads an advertisement on the Synthesis website. “An education worthy of SpaceX,” reads another.
Earlier this year, Synthesis co-founder Chrisman Frank said the company’s AI models are on the precipice of surpassing human teachers. “[AI] will actually be superior to having a human teach you in math, science, anything that's technical and there's an objective reality,” he said. “I think we pretty much have that cracked.”
That thinking parallels Musk’s own speculative AI marketing. “What can it do?” he said at an October event previewing a humanoid assistant that Tesla plans to sell for tens of thousands of dollars. “It can be a teacher or babysit your kids.” Musk has also predicted that AI will revolutionize education. “[An AI teacher] will be very patient, will be almost always correct, and can tailor the lessons specifically to the child,” he said in May. “It will be like each child has Einstein for a teacher.”
Musk, an avid gamer, served as the inspiration for the collaborative, problem-solving video games created by Synthesis. “What Elon's doing, what's he really good at, is constantly going to new games and… figuring out very quickly what is important,” Frank said in January. “We just want to create an environment where kids can get that kind of practice with other kids who are taking it seriously.”
Frank has said the company has fielded inquiries from U.S. school systems and national governments. In February 2025, Synthesis announced a partnership with the state of Oklahoma to make its AI tutor available to third grade students starting in the fall. But even as Synthesis expands, Frank has called the company’s approach “unapologetically elitist.”
“We want to make something for the kids that we think are most likely to have a high impact, because we think those kids are underserved by the system, because there is this ideology of equality or equity that's everywhere in education,” he said. “We're going to be totally fine if this thing helps the top 10% of kids more than it helps the bottom 10%. We don't really care.”
Popular Information, Musk Watch’s sister publication, obtained a memo detailing the Trump administration’s plan to sabatoge the Social Security administration. You can read the full report HERE.
Long-time educator here...Without any content knowledge, actual "critical thinking" is impossible. How can a question about the organization and control of societies be meaningfully answered by students who know virtually nothing of history, economics and sociology? And I doubt Musk's schools' curriculum include solid content given that he seems to have been so poorly educated on so much himself.
“What Elon's doing, what's he really good at, is constantly going to new games and… figuring out very quickly what is important[...]"--Given the revelation that he has hired people to get him high scores in video games and takes credit himself regardless, is this something we should actually put faith in? In addition to his critical lack of knowledge of how education is supposed to work, even the items he's supposed to be an expert on are things bolstered by actual experts hidden under a sheet. At the best he's a Wizard of Oz humbug.