Elon Musk Education

Elon Musk attended Waterkloof House Preparatory School and Bryanston High School before graduating from Pretoria Boys High School. When he was only 10, he became acquainted with programming via the Commodore VIC-20, an inexpensive home computer. In one telling incident at that time, Musk along with his brother planned to open a video game arcade near their school. He aimed to enter The United States and the easiest way to do that was through applying for a Canadian passport with the help of his mother’s Canadian citizenship. While awaiting his documentation, he attended the University of Pretoria for five months. Upon being granted a Canadian passport, he did odd jobs for a couple of months and went on to attend Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. He transferred to the University of Pennsylvania two years later and graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in economics and a Bachelor of Arts degree in physics in the year 1995. The two majors speak to the direction Musk’s career would take later, but it was physics that made the deepest impression. In the summer of 1994, Musk held two internships in Silicon Valley: at energy storage startup Pinnacle Research Institute and at the Palo Alto-based startup Rocket Science Games. In 1995, he was accepted for a Ph.D program in materials science at Stanford University in California. He decided to drop out of Stanford two days following a job rejection he received from Netscape.