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Education

Elon Musk Is Funding a New School In Austin, Texas (cnn.com) 167

"Associates of Elon Musk are planning to launch a new primary and secondary school," reports CNN, "and ultimately a university, in Austin, Texas, with the help of a nearly $100 million donation from the billionaire, tax documents show..." Members of Musk's inner circle — including Jared Birchall, who runs Musk's family office — are named as leaders of The Foundation, a new school planning to teach "STEM subjects and other topics," in an application to the Internal Revenue Service asking for tax-exempt status last year... The IRS filing, dated October 2022, was obtained and posted publicly by Bloomberg, which first reported plans for the school on Wednesday... "The School is being designed to meet the educational needs of those with proven academic and scientific potential, who will thrive in a rigorous, project based curriculum," the filing posted by Bloomberg states.

The school plans to initially enroll about 50 students and grow over time, according to the filing. It expects to be funded through donations and tuition fees, although it notes that the school will offer scholarships to support students who couldn't otherwise afford to attend... "The School intends ultimately to expand its operations to create a university dedicated to education at the highest levels," according to the filing...

The Foundation said in its filing said that it had raised around $100 million in contributions since mid-2022 for the new Austin school. The 2022 annual 990 tax filing for the Musk Foundation, also made public by Bloomberg, notes that the Musk charity donated $10 million in cash to the group that year, as well as nearly $90 million worth of Tesla stock.

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Elon Musk Is Funding a New School In Austin, Texas

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  • by serviscope_minor ( 664417 ) on Sunday December 17, 2023 @04:45AM (#64086837) Journal

    Sounds from TFA like it's going to be another weird billionaire's playground. At $100,000,000, they'll be able to afford good facilities and some good teachers.

    It's a bit weird wanting to get into primary education for kids with "proven academic and scientific potential". Kids are pretty half formed at the primary stage, frankly, especially at the beginning of the primary stage. And he wants to found a university I guess. Billionaires have done that before but the more recent examples (ahem Trump University) haven't had such a good record.

    It sounds like an ego project along the lines of "I'm rich and therefore smart and I know better".

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Sunday December 17, 2023 @04:52AM (#64086847) Homepage Journal

      It will be like one of those religious schools, except that instead of a picture of Jesus feeding 10,000 starving people on the wall, it will be Elon Musk unbanning 10,000 Twitter Nazis.

      Seriously though, people who care about education give money to schools. People who want to indoctrinate kids start them.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        Musk doesn't seem to have much of an attention span - he'll move on, and the school will probably turn out well because of the funding.

        Ultimately, it is unfortunate that the US is in a position where billionaires see a need (or opportunity) to do this sort of thing.

        • by quenda ( 644621 )

          Musk doesn't seem to have much of an attention span

          You are talking about a guy who has been going on about transition to solar-electric, and colonising Mars since he was a kid in South Africa.
          Even the Twitter debacle is a continuation of his ambitions for X.com and Paypal 20 years ago.

          • I ordered my personal flame thrower yesterday and it'll get here via the underground hyper tunnel.

          • by careysub ( 976506 ) on Sunday December 17, 2023 @11:56AM (#64087199)

            Musk doesn't seem to have much of an attention span

            You are talking about a guy who has been going on about transition to solar-electric, and colonising Mars since he was a kid in South Africa. Even the Twitter debacle is a continuation of his ambitions for X.com and Paypal 20 years ago.

            Having long term obsessions and a short attention span are not really contradictions. Having both together is commonly observed - the fixations provide the theme around which the attention jumps.

            Take for example the "colonizing Mars" thing you bring up - does he really have a coherent approach to getting to "colonizing Mars"? What we have seen is in 2016 Musk planning to land the Dragon capsule on Mars "as soon as 2018" [time.com], and a Mars colony by 2024 [dw.com]maybe 2028?, or (last year) sending someone to Mars in 2029 [npr.org]?

            You see here the long term fixation combined with the erratic short term jumps from one imaginary scheme to the next. And the Mars fixation is explained by the Musk's apparently life-long grand delusion that he is the most important person in human history since he is going to save the human race by colonizing Mars [theverge.com]. The Verge piece was written more than 9 years ago, but Musk is still obsessing on it [thedailybeast.com]. But he really has no plausible strategy for achieving this self-aggrandizing delusional objective. Despite the real achievements of SpaceX the Mars thing is one half-baked hare-brained scheme after another.

        • Not necessarily (Score:2, Informative)

          by rsilvergun ( 571051 )
          There's a huge push to privatize public education in America going on right now. If successful it would be hundreds of billions of dollars in new corporate profits.. so there's a lot of interest. Remember that both of Elon musk's companies exist because of heavy government subsidies, Tesla for example exists because there waas a government carbon credit program to basically pay him to build EVs so that the other car companies didn't have to meet emissions requirements and of course SpaceX is still primaril
          • Re:Not necessarily (Score:4, Insightful)

            by SchroedingersCat ( 583063 ) on Sunday December 17, 2023 @12:27PM (#64087239)
            University with pure merit-based admissions is a novel concept in our times. Since no one is doing that, it presents a business opportunity.
            • Because having just put a kid through college a few years ago I can tell you right now that yes the public university system is entirely merit-based. They do not however abandon kids just because they are not super geniuses. What would be the point of having a college system that only existed to admit people who didn't need education because they were some kind of super genius freaks?
              • by DarkOx ( 621550 )

                Education and genius are completely different things, genius might allow one to excel in an educational setting but a genius has just as much need for education as anyone else. Actually they have more need for it because they can actually put it to good use.

                For someone who writes so much about this you'd think you'd understand the difference.

                Frankly Universities SHOULD abandon people who can't keep up. If you can't you can't, and you won't really be able to effectively employ what you are learning there.

            • by Nugoo ( 1794744 )
              How would a business make money doing this without charging tuition?
      • by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Sunday December 17, 2023 @06:15AM (#64086875)

        I guess I'm not the only one who got reminded of the NAPOLA [wikipedia.org].

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by dfghjk ( 711126 )

          You are not, and what better a disguise for a fascist think tank than a tax exempt university? Government subsidy for Musk's benefit is his standard move.

        • I guess I'm not the only one who got reminded of the NAPOLA [wikipedia.org].

          Or the Jugendbund der NSDAP for the little ones.

          While of course, the true believers will, stomp their feet and downmod us when they get the chance for daring to besmirch fearless leader, he's been allegedly getting a tad erratic in recent times, and he does allegedly love him his ketamine - Allegedly, mind you. https://nypost.com/2023/08/22/... [nypost.com] His security clearance is under review. https://taskandpurpose.com/new... [taskandpurpose.com] Trust me, you don't want to ever fill out a new SF-86.

          Tesla is concerned about his

          • I'm not at all concerned about his Ketamine use, ever since I heard about Matt Perry [wikipedia.org].

            More power to him! I believe in him!

            • I'm not at all concerned about his Ketamine use, ever since I heard about Matt Perry [wikipedia.org].

              More power to him! I believe in him!

              Well, that's a disturbing article. The pop culture set does seem inclined to abuse drugs. At the moment, the abuse of Ozempic, the drug treatment for type 2 diabetes, is all the rage for the stars to lose weight. https://news.yahoo.com/people-... [yahoo.com]

              There's a certain irony in that people like Kelly Clarkson - the one time flag bearer for the body positive movement has suddenly peeled off over 40 pounds in a really short time. Or the owner of Weight Watchers - Oprah Winfrey and her sudden weight loss. Hmm, th

              • "Ozempic" for weight loss mat be off-label. But by no means is it abuse. The exact same drug (semaglutide) is approved and sold for weight loss under the name "Wegovy." The only difference is that Wegovy is a higher dose than Ozempic. So what's the beef? In fact, if the lower dosage will do for that specific individual, it seems to me that it'd be preferable to go with Ozempic instead.

                • "Ozempic" for weight loss mat be off-label. But by no means is it abuse. The exact same drug (semaglutide) is approved and sold for weight loss under the name "Wegovy." The only difference is that Wegovy is a higher dose than Ozempic. So what's the beef? In fact, if the lower dosage will do for that specific individual, it seems to me that it'd be preferable to go with Ozempic instead.

                  It's the timeline. the amount of weight people like Winfrey and Clarkson have peeled off in way too short a time is akin to starvation. That does nasty things to the old ticker and other organs.

                  They are abusing themselves. As well, Semaglutide does have side effects https://www.nbcnews.com/health... [nbcnews.com] like pancreatitis, bowel obstruction, acute gallbladder disease, ileus and delayed gastric emptying. A woman recently brought suit against Novo Nordisc because she now has stomach paralysis - probably not

      • by mjwx ( 966435 )

        It will be like one of those religious schools, except that instead of a picture of Jesus feeding 10,000 starving people on the wall, it will be Elon Musk unbanning 10,000 Twitter Nazis.

        Seriously though, people who care about education give money to schools. People who want to indoctrinate kids start them.

        Pretty much this.

        Give me your children until they are seven and they'll be mine for life.

        Musk thought that by buying Twitter he'd be able to control what people thought. He was horribly wrong because he's never had to interact with people on a normal level, it's a skill he's never learned thus is constantly frustrated that people have thoughts and ideas he doesn't agree with.

    • by quenda ( 644621 )

      It's a bit weird wanting to get into primary education for kids with "proven academic and scientific potential". Kids are pretty half formed at the primary stage,

      My kids primary school ran on-entry testing at age 5-6. The rationale is to identify special needs, but with one-on-one testing, it is also surprisingly good at identifying future high achievers. They would not try to run classroom multi-choice standardised testing until at least age 10.

      • My kids primary school ran on-entry testing at age 5-6. The rationale is to identify special needs, but with one-on-one testing, it is also surprisingly good at identifying future high achievers.

        Turns out you can pretty much identify achievement by looking at zip code.

        • by quenda ( 644621 )

          Turns out you can pretty much identify achievement by looking at zip code.

          That would have been a bit useless, considering almost all the kids at the school lived in the same postcode.
          It is such an obviously wrong thing to say (they are not all equally smart, or equal achievers) that I have to ask what were you thinking?

          I guess you are referring to the cycle of low IQ, poverty and social class, and the cost of housing leading to increasingly class-segregated neighbourhoods?
          When I live, public housing is distributed around the city, so as not to create ghettos like some US cities h

      • Bear in mind some of the confirmation bias there, “predicting the future then plotting to make it so” type thing. If you ID “early achievers” and then give those kids more resources, advanced help, etc than other kids you will often create a self fulfilling prophecy.
    • Pulling a page from Trump University except he starts indoctrination at a younger age before pulling the rug.
    • by XXongo ( 3986865 ) on Sunday December 17, 2023 @10:48AM (#64087095) Homepage

      Sounds from TFA like it's going to be another weird billionaire's playground. At $100,000,000, they'll be able to afford good facilities and some good teachers.

      That's $110,000,000 funding, plus an endowment of $90,000,000 of Tesla stock.

      200 million for fifty students; four million dollars per student. Yes, should be able to do pretty good.

      I expect he's believing his own tweets about children being 'indoctrinated' by the 'woke mind virus', and wants to set up a school to indoctrinate them with good conservative values instead. With a four million dollar per student education, that should help. There are plenty of conservative schools that are religious in nature (and funded with equally large and larger endowments), so what's new here is not that it's a conservative school, but that it's not a religious one.

      • Do you have kids in school now or in the last, say, 10 years?

        I do.

        If you don't then you have no idea how bad the schools have become.

        And that's not how budgets work. That's not a $200m/year budget. That's $200m starting funds to build a campus, pay lawyers to deal with paperwork, hire people, pay them to move to Texas, buy equipment, busses, books, computers, and so on and have enough cash left to take a loss for several years until they have enough paying students to turn a profit or at least get close t

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by grasshoppa ( 657393 )

      I love how, 5 years ago, you and those like you would have been celebrating this.

      BUT, the machine told you that to be a good person, you must hate Musk, so you're hating Musk now.

      Good bot.

    • It's a bit weird wanting to get into primary education for kids with "proven academic and scientific potential". Kids are pretty half formed at the primary stage, frankly, especially at the beginning of the primary stage.

      Elon Musk has 11 children. Most of those were conceived through artificial insemination and Elon's personal eugenics program. With this school, I wouldn't be surprised if he plans to have 20 additional kids, that he would mix in with the gifted children of other parents and other oligarchs.

    • Remember what education is like in this state, wrt things like evolution and slavery.

  • For teaching slave drivers for Mars?

  • by chas.williams ( 6256556 ) on Sunday December 17, 2023 @09:26AM (#64086969)
    That's just about all of Musk's children.
  • Yep, Elon found out that the he cannot change the world as it is today. Too many stupid people! He tried.Next? Teach kids the "right" way directly from the start. Didn't Trump do a university to train people the right way? What is it with these people.
    • by dfghjk ( 711126 ) on Sunday December 17, 2023 @10:35AM (#64087081)

      Musk isn't interested in changing the world, that's just his sales pitch. He's interested in wealth, power and strokes of his ego. It's all a competition for him.

      "Didn't Trump do a university to train people the right way?"

      No, everything Trump does is pure grift. And you assume Musk wants to "train people the right way", bad assumption. It's to increase power and influence, nothing more.

  • These dumbasses thinks they're Hari Seldon.
  • But sadly, this does not solve a thing.

    Instead, he himself has noticed that the quality and numbers of fresh-out-of-school American engineers is decreasing. This is a cumulative effect of Americas education falling apart, combined with our best and brightest not going into hard fields.
    • by Khyber ( 864651 )

      "Instead, he himself has noticed that the quality and numbers of fresh-out-of-school American engineers is decreasing."

      But he's too stupid to see he's supporting policies that make such a thing happen.

  • intelligent people tend to be liberal.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by ScentCone ( 795499 )

      intelligent people tend to be liberal.

      No, intelligent people are more likely to go to college. And colleges have been administratively occupied by (now) at least two generations of lefties cultivated by the aging hippies from the 1960s. The schools they run become progressive cultural echo chambers, churning out more of the same. If by "liberal" you mean it in the classic sense (liberty-minded), then you're right. But there is nothing liberty-minded about the contemporary liberal (as that term is now used) contingent running education in K-thr

      • by Tarlus ( 1000874 )

        It's more accurate to say that unintelligent people tend to identify as conservative. They're far easier for right wing organizations to manipulate.

        But there is nothing liberty-minded about the contemporary liberal (as that term is now used) contingent running education in K-through-PhD. The opposite.

        Could you expand on this?

  • ...who will be taught that labor laws are for losers, so are government regulations. Lying about your product is "free speech", and that performative photo-ops in Israel are better than actually doing anything about antisemitism.

  • Typical billionaire stuff. LOL. This was tried before by a railroad billionaire. His name was Leland Stanford. What a joke that turned out to be.

    • Don't forget about the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation meddling in education.
      When you are rich, you are right.

  • Looking forward to watching a documentary version of "Succession: The Space Wars" in a couple of decades.

  • I wonder if these new schools will feature lessons on Elon Musk's penchant for arrogance, mendacity, bigotry, foolishness, and idiocy. His actions since he took over ExTwitter have certain borne out these aspects of his character. The man's intelligent but he seems to have a peculiar ability to sublimate his gifts when running X as his actions there have brought out the worst in the man.

    • It will feature Peter Thiel at storybook hour reading about Intelligent Design and cryogenics before stealing kids' blood at nap time.
  • Will my WeWork WeGrow school credits transfer?
  • Because this is pretty much a meaningless project.

    • by Mandrake ( 3939 )

      He's just a whiny baby pretty much 100% of the time. He's sad because nobody wants to pay him to advertise next to hate speech on twitter.

  • If we had an appropriate tax system there would be no philanthropy.

  • The First Church of Lord Elmo is going to have a "school". I can hardly wait. You thought religious schools were bad before lol.

  • 1. Will any of these schools be accredited? If not, they're bs, and on par with Trump U.
    2-10: see #1.
    11. When he's done, is he going to ask for public funding, calling them charter schools?

  • by elcor ( 4519045 )
    I hope they keeps the name.
  • You know it's going to be half-assed, for-profit, and take years to develop before being abandoned. (SVCF is a tax credits now, give later tax dodge scam.)

The most important early product on the way to developing a good product is an imperfect version.

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