Elon Musk’s Montessori school in Texas can now open its doors.
The school, which has been in the works since last year, received initial approval from Texas’ child welfare regulator on Thursday, according to the agency, paving the way for Elon Musk begin building ambitious STEM-focused education plans that could eventually include multiple K–12 independent schools and even an in-state college.
The Montessori school—dubbed “Ad Astra” (Latin for “toward the stars”) in reference to Musk’s plans for interplanetary travel—is located about 40 minutes from Austin, in Bastrop County, where several of Musk’s companies have operations. The independent school in Bastrop could eventually enroll up to 54 students in upper and lower elementary grades, with a dedicated faculty and an overarching mission to provide an educational institution “dedicated to STEM education at the highest levels,” according to documents the Musk-funded nonprofit reviewed Wealth.
Ad Astra’s first students in Bastrop will be between the ages of 3 and 6 and will attend a preschool that focuses on exploration and tasks such as coloring, making collages and studying maps and globes.
The school experienced some initial hiccups with applications and inspection delays, but after passing an inspection earlier this month, Ad Astra received its initial state license on Nov. 14 and is now considered a licensed child care program, according to the Texas Health and of Community Services, which regulates child care centers in the state. The Ad Astra preschool can enroll nearly two dozen children, according to the agency, although it appears that only 16 are initially expected, according to application documents the school submitted to the state and obtained Wealth through the request of the Law on Freedom of Access to Information.
Bastrop Ad Astra is Musk’s second big push to push education. The earlier Ad Astra School was conceived about a decade ago when Musk asked his son’s fourth-grade teacher to open a school for her children and children SpaceX employees. The school opened in 2014, but after Musk’s children graduated, Ad Astra and its faculty spun off into an independent distance-only school called Astra New 2020, according to an interview the co-founder gave in 2021. The nonprofit entity that ran Ad Astra sold the mobile home, furniture, workforce and intellectual property to SpaceX, according to applications for non-profit organizations. In 2018, a new school called Discovery began operations at the SpaceX campus, managed by Xplor Education, which also operates a Montessori school in Hawaii.
This time, Musk’s school plans look grander. The Musk Foundation has allocated nearly $100 million through a nonprofit organization called the X Foundation that will build an initial elementary and middle school and eventually open a university, all should go well, according to the nonprofit. Ad Astra is the latest subsidiary in a wide range of jobs and projects related to Musk, the richest person in the worldwho was recently appointed by the newly elected president Donald Trump to oversee the new “Department of Government Efficiency.”
Work and play
For now, Musk is starting small — in a white farmhouse with a long porch off a busy farm-to-market road in Bastrop County, Texas — one block from where some of The facilities of Musk’s company are located and where is Xa’s new headquarters (social media site formerly known as Twitter which Musk bought for $44 billion in 2022) will be built.
Ad Astra Preschool will be led by Xplor Education CEO Greg Marick, according to the preschool’s state filing, and three other staff members have been hired since last summer. And his approach to learning will revolve around exploration, with young children learning how to fasten things, color and draw, collage, put words together and study globes and maps. There is a basketball court outside, and according to the documents, children will be able to play with tricycles and balls. The curriculum itself—which includes periods for “work” and “play” and teaches children to sweep, apologize to others, and “resolve conflict”—is inspired by the work of Alfred Adler and Rudolf Dreikurs, two psychologists and educators, to “teach young people to become responsible, respectful and resourceful members of our community,” Ad Astra’s license application states. As a Montessori school, the school is likely to also emphasize independent learning, hands-on experiences, and cooperative play. It’s unclear whether any of Musk’s six youngest children — who are under the age of 5 and reportedly live at Musk’s compound in nearby Austin, according to The Wall Street Journal— will attend.
In practice, it is likely that Ad Astra may look quite similar to Hala Kahiki Montessori School Lāna’i, a school in Hawaii also operated by Xplor Education. Some of Ad Astra’s admissions application questions are almost identical to those for Hala Kahiki, and Ad Astra’s permit application appears to mistakenly refer to the school as Hala Kahiki in at least one instance, when it says students will work with local elders and experts “to learn about the island community”.
It is unclear how much parents will pay for their children to attend the Bastrop Ad Astra school. Tuition at Hala Kahiki Montessori School is $968 per month, according to the school’s website.
In X Foundation documents describing Ad Astra School in Bastrop, the plan calls for the elementary school’s junior and senior levels to be expanded beyond the initial capacity of 54 students “based on the needs of the local community and on a timeline that ensures a quality education and overall experience.” The school could also include distance learners, according to the document, which in one instance misspelled Bastrop as Bastop.
Musk’s name is nowhere in the application materials themselves, though Tesla and The directors of SpaceX fingerprints are all over the new school project. The X Foundation, funded by the Musk Foundation, owns the property where the school is located and has outlined plans for the project in filings. He submitted the initial state application of Ad Astra Jared Birchall, Musk’s financial advisor and longtime confidant. And Xplor Education, which stands behind “Discovery Preschool” near SpaceX’s campus in Hawthorne, Calif., posted job ads for the new Bastrop school and has a “coming soon” page for Ad Astra on its website.
Musk and Birchall did not respond to a request for comment. When it comes to Wealth, Marick said he was not authorized to speak to reporters and declined to comment.
