The billionaire who launches rockets can't launch a Texas school. State records show it operates as child care and doesn't serve school-age children
Jordan Vonderhaar/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Elon Musk built a Texas school called Ad Astra — Latin for “to the stars” — with his usual moonshot ambition. But the state’s paperwork describes something that hasn’t quite gotten off the ground: a licensed child-care program that “does not care for school-age children,” according to the Texas Health and Human Services Commission.
The plan in Bastrop, Texas — a quick drive from Musk-linked operations including SpaceX — was far bigger than today’s reality. Ad Astra was pitched as a private school for prekindergarten through fifth or sixth grade, with a Montessori-style, child-centered approach and a STEM-forward gloss. When enrollment opened for roughly 50 kids, thousands of families applied. Some parents said the pitch included mixed-grade classrooms, outdoor science, even animals such as horses and chickens. Tuition was expected to run about $1,000 a month, and families were told nondisclosure agreements could be part of admission.
Instead, recent reporting from The New York Times describes a program caring for about 10 children ages 5 and under, staffed by two caregivers, with nap schedules and simple snacks. The Times reports that the project ran into the kind of mundane friction that kills big visions quietly: Ad Astra had to resubmit its permit application and address a staff member’s missing education credits for “director qualifications.” The opening date slipped at least twice. The school’s representatives held an informational Zoom $ZM meeting for parents in October 2024, but by late 2025, there was little visible activity at the site beyond security turning reporters away.
Musk, who has at least 14 children, doesn’t appear to have his own kids enrolled at the Bastrop school; four of his kids with current partner Shivon Zilis are reportedly being home-schooled. Meanwhile, the Tesla $TSLA, SpaceX, and xAI CEO has stayed busy expanding his influence far beyond factories and launchpads. He went to Washington to “work” as the head of DOGE — after helping bankroll President Donald Trump’s return to the White House.
Musk’s stalling school fits a familiar billionaire genre. Other wealthy figures have tried to start schools, with mixed results. Billionaire founders are used to building worlds where the product is the institution: ship the app, recruit the users, write the rules later. Schools are the opposite. The institution is the product, and it comes with a hundred invisible dependencies that don’t care about your name, your capital, or your appetite for “disruption.” Regulators want credentials, filings, and minimum standards — and those don’t yield to a billionaire’s timeline, no matter how much money they can throw at things.
The recent $1 trillion man himself has tried since 2021 to open multiple schools — plus a university — through a nonprofit set up by his adviser Jared Birchall, with Musk donating $100 million to that organization and the Musk Foundation contributing about $607 million since 2022. The university doesn’t appear to be progressing, and an accrediting body the nonprofit had pointed to said it couldn’t find communications from Musk about accreditation.
The Tesla CEO has talked for years about education as something that should feel interactive — “as close to a video game as possible,” he once said — and tailored to each child’s pace and aptitude. He built an earlier Ad Astra at SpaceX in California in 2014, then watched it shift online during the pandemic and eventually change hands. In Texas, he tried again: a new Ad Astra at SpaceX’s Boca Chica launch site. And then: the Bastrop effort.
Musk can bend markets. He can bend media. He can move capital across projects like he’s rearranging furniture. He can even, to a remarkable degree, bend politics. But education — the thing he keeps flirting with as a system he’d like to “fix” — is built to resist exactly that kind of founder control. A functioning elementary school still comes down to staffing, compliance, governance, and time — the unglamorous present that doesn’t care what you named the dream.
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