Did Elon Musk Drop Out of College?
Elon Musk is one of the most successful businessmen on the planet. He founded a number of major companies and has an innovative vision for the future. He’s one of the richest men in the world as well with an estimated net worth of more than $300 billion. Musk is also a college dropout, well, sort of.
Some people have heard that the Tesla CEO dropped out of college, while others heard he actually earned a degree. So which is it? We’re clearing up any confusion about Musk’s education.
The university Musk dropped out of and why
Elon Reeve Musk was born on June 28, 1971, in Pretoria, South Africa.
He attended Waterkloof House Preparatory School and then graduated high school in the South African capital city before immigrating to Canada when he was 18. Musk enrolled at Queen’s University in Ontario and later decided to transfer to the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. There, he earned not one but two degrees from the Ivy League school—a Bachelor of Arts in physics and a Bachelor of Science in economics.
After graduating from UPenn in 1995, Musk moved to California where he attended Stanford University. However, after just two days, he made the decision to drop out and start his own company.
That company was Zip2 Corporation. In 1999, Musk sold Zip2 for $306 million. The same year, he co-founded X.com (not to be confused with the social media platform formally known as Twitter), an online financial services company. In 2002 X.com, which had merged with Confinity to form PayPal, was acquired by eBay for $1.5 billion in stock. As PayPal’s largest shareholder, Musk received $175.8 million.
The entrepreneur also founded SpaceX in 2002. The following year, Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning founded Tesla. Musk, along with Ian Wright and J.B. Straubel, were the company’s first employees and named co-founders.
In 2022, Musk bought what was then known as Twitter for $44 billion including $33.5 billion in equity.
Other interesting facts about Musk
Some other interesting facts you may not have known about Musk are that he’s been married three times (twice to the same woman) and has fathered 12 children. The Telsa CEO once opined that civilization would crumble if people didn’t have more kids.
“I’m trying to set a good example. Got to practice what I preach,” he told the Wall Street Journal in 2021.
One of his sons, Nevada, died of SIDS in 2002.
Another one of the tech mogul’s sons is named Xavier. Musk admitted that he named him after the comic book character Professor Xavier of Marvel’s X-Men. And Musk himself was the inspiration for another Marvel character.
When Robert Downey Jr. was preparing to play the role of Tony Stark in the film Iron Man, the actor said that he turned to Musk for inspiration. When the two men met, Musk helped Downey add some of his own mannerisms to the character.
