Mother Jones illustration; Evan Agostini/Invision/AP; Getty
In February, Elon Musk tweeted a warning shot. “When not wasting money on bureaucracy,” he wrote, “The Department of Education has been funding anti-Americanism, gender nonsense and anti-meritocratic racism.”
By the end of the month, the department had been stripped to the bone, dismantled by Donald Trump and Musk’s DOGE. And on Thursday, Education Secretary Linda McMahon, who has said her agency’s “final mission” would be to send education programs “back to the states,” was on hand as the president signed an executive order to begin eliminating what remained of the department.
The companies’ founders share an admiration for Musk and desire to help their students replicate his success.
At the same time that federal support for public education is imperiled, two private online education programs whose seeds were planted with Musk and SpaceX are getting a second wind. Both could see even more growth under the country’s emerging educational environment. So too could a physical, Musk-linked school that’s been newly opened near the Texas compound housing several of his companies.
Astra Nova School and Synthesis Tutor are two non-traditional, online educational programs that are intertwined, share a common origin, and both began with their creators’ admiration for Elon Musk. Synthesis Tutor was co-founded by Joshua Dahn and Chrisman Frank. Dahn is also the founder and executive director of Astra Nova, and helped found its precursor school, which operated at SpaceX teaching Musk’s and some of his employees’ children. Synthesis Tutor, which has its roots in a particular class offered at that school, bills itself as an AI-powered “superhuman” math tutoring program, while Astra Nova is a broader online experimental educational program that says it currently teaches about 300 kids ages 10-14 worldwide. (AstraNova also has a partnership with ClassDojo, an educational tech company used in both public and private elementary schools to aid parent-teacher communication. Frank was previously an engineer at ClassDojo.)
Dahn and Frank credit their companies’ approach to their desire to help their students replicate Musk’s success. And both Synthesis Tutor and Astra Nova have recently come under renewed scrutiny due to their philosophical ties the billionaire at a time when public education is under threat from DOGE and the federal government.
Frank has been especially clear about Synthesis Tutor’s mission to “replace entire functions of the teacher,” as he tweeted recently, and supplant educators with AI. (While Frank worked at ClassDojo, he doesn’t appear to have a background in teaching or pedagogy; Synthesis acknowledged a request for comment but did not respond to questions.)
“No one wants to admit it,” Frank tweeted in July, “but the vast majority of teachers are glorified babysitters. In the age of personal computers, it is insane to trust the local babysitter to teach kids cognitive skills that may in many cases be beyond the teacher’s own grasp.”
“I think it’s adorable when people think we are going to fix education by improving teachers,” he tweeted on March 13. “Sorry, it’s AI tutors or the slow death of civilization. Those are the choices.”
“First step,” he also wrote in March, “stop teachers from teaching.”
Astra Nova is also meant to be an alternative or a supplement to traditional schooling. The school, which Dahn told Mother Jones is in the “final stage” of accreditation by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges, only offers online instruction. Its winter courses are a grab-bag of mostly STEM-focused offerings: a history of astronomy, a course on the “practical side” of chemistry, one on microbes and human health. Others—like one focussed on writing fiction about dragons, and one on stand up comedy—would be easy to imagine Musk deriding if offered in a public school.
A centerpiece of Astra Nova’s curriculum are its so-called “Conundrums,” many of which are available on YouTube and through the ClassDojo partnership. As Musk Watch’s Caleb Ecarma recently reported, the proprietary video series presents “open-ended” legal and ethical questions for students to weigh. As ClassDojo puts it, they’re meant to introduce “the challenging idea that not all problems have a clear right answer.”
But some of the scenarios posed present clear legal or ethical problems in ways that are not always reflected in how the questions are asked. For example, one scenario highlighted by Ecarma, “The Arcade Conundrum,” suggests there might be two sides to the idea of running a rigged, “impossible” arcade claw machine that takes patrons’ money with no chance to win.
“Every state needs a DOGE… Start by looking at the public school system.”
Others are notable given Musk’s investments in artificial intelligence research and his history of funding Astra Nova’s precursor school. One asks whether citizens should vote for an “AI-powered politician” who commits to be “a puppet” of a machine intelligence system that “will make every decision, no matter how small.” Another, “The Film Conundrum,” posits a scenario in which an entirely AI-made movie is hailed by “a group of trusted critics pledged to secrecy” as “brilliant, wildly creative, positively life-changing, and perhaps the greatest film ever made.” But, the conundrum continues, “based on the current political climate, an ‘AI movie’ will never see the light of day; it will be legally attacked and banned from release.” Should the studio behind the film keep the fact it was made by AI secret, allowing it to win awards and public praise? Although the video-depicts a murmuring anti-AI mob, the narrator doesn’t mention any reason why an AI-made film would be “legally attacked” or controversial. It’s unclear whether these videos are meant to be paired with any discussion about the intense ethical debates around AI, as that context is essentially absent from the videos. Dahn didn’t respond to specific questions about the Conundrums.
In a nod to Musk’s rocket and satellite making, the educational programs use a tangle of celestial names. Astra Nova grew out of Ad Astra, a private schooling program that Musk founded in 2014 on SpaceX’s Southern California campus after he and his then-wife Justine pulled their five sons out of the Mirman School, a decades-old private institution in Los Angeles.
“They weren’t doing the things I thought should be done,” Musk said during an interview with a Beijing TV station. “I thought, ‘Well, let’s see what we can do. Maybe creating a school would be better.’”
Musk took Josh Dahn, who’d been teaching his kids at Mirman, with him. Dahn, an award-winning Teach for America alum, has written that he saw starting Ad Astra for Musk as both an awesome responsibility and opportunity. “Some kids were brilliant,” he tweeted in 2021, “but kindness and eagerness to learn (& parents that worked at SpaceX) were the only criteria for admission.” At the time, Dahn wrote, “I considered a few different approaches, but I kept returning to how Elon solved complex problems. He could go into meetings and collaborate with employees, audit their reasoning, & communicate priorities, even when he didn’t have all the context. How can kids learn that skill?”
Ad Astra continued to run on the SpaceX campus until Musk’s sons graduated, shuttering in 2020; Astra Nova was spun off as a nonprofit in August of that year. After Synthesis was spun off from an Ad Astra class, it initially required an admissions process, as Astra Nova still does, but is now open to everyone for $180 a year.
In 2021, Ad Astra reestablished itself near the SpaceX launch facility in Brownsville, Texas, where, according to an archived webpage, it boasted of “disrupting the traditional education model” through a “self-paced” and “learner driven community.” According to nonprofit filings, that brick and mortar school shuttered and dissolved in 2023; it’s unclear how many students ever attended. But in late February, local news reports indicated that SpaceX had filed a permit to begin construction on a new Ad Astra school building in the area that will serve infants to twelfth graders. It’s not clear whether it will be open to all, or limited to families with connections to Musk or his companies; SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment.
“Sorry, it’s AI tutors or the slow death of civilization. Those are the choices.”
Another physical Ad Astra school has also begun operations in Bastrop, Texas—a community outside Austin where Musk has established a corporate compound housing Tesla, SpaceX, and the Boring Company; Twitter will soon relocate to the company town, which has been dubbed “Snailbrook.” That version of Ad Astra contains a program for ages 3-6 and a “lower elementary” school for kids 6-9. The Bastrop school, which bills itself as creating “the next generation of problem solvers and builders,” is open to all; it also did not respond to a request for comment.
A sample curriculum guide for the Bastrop school, obtained by Texas journalist Lauren McGaughy, lists Jared Birchall as manager and CEO. Birchall, Musk’s longtime wealth manager, is also CEO of Musk-owned Neuralink.
Dahn told Mother Jones he is “not involved in Texas Ad Astra schools.” He also said that “Astra Nova and Synthesis are independent of one another; Elon is not involved in either one.”
While Astra Nova doesn’t take a specific public stance on AI, Synthesis Tutor co-founder Chrisman Frank has repeatedly argued that AI education programs are superior to traditional, human teachers.
In March, Chrisman shared a tweet laying out his vision for how his AI product could displace educators. “Teaching is going to become something different,” Chrisman wrote. “When the Tutor reaches a certain stage of maturity, will be a neutron bomb to education worldwide.”
In an undated essay he wrote sometime after leaving his job at ClassDoJo in 2020, Frank approvingly noted three shifts he saw underway: the rise of online education, the rise of homeschools and “micro schools,” and the rise of “school choice,” a term used by some to describe a system where students can get taxpayer funding to attend an alternative to their normal public school.
“Under school choice, bad schools die, good ones flourish, and the system overall becomes anti-fragile,” he wrote.
School choice is expected to skyrocket under the Trump administration—a development critics warn will funnel government funding to religious, private, and for-profit institutions, weakening public education. Musk, too, has tweeted in support of school choice, not-so-subtly pressuring the speaker of Texas’s statehouse in February create a voucher system that could support schools like Ad Astra: “I hope Dustin Burrows passes school choice in Texas to give kids a chance. If kids only have one school option and it’s bad, then it’s like they never had a chance at all.”
Although Synthesis Tutor has recently made inroads into public schools—this month, Dahn and Frank announced a pilot with the state of Oklahoma to help teach math in participating third-grade classrooms—Chrisman has made it clear that his overall goal is to destroy, or at the very least fundamentally alter, them. “Every state needs a DOGE,” he tweeted in February. “Start by looking at the public school system.” (For his part, Dahn told Mother Jones, “I personally believe public schools should exist and must improve.”)
In an interview presented by New Founding, the anti-progressive venture capital firm, Frank described Synthesis as “unapologetically elitist… We’re not in the position of, like, judging who is elite and who isn’t. But we want to make something for the kids that we think are most likely to have a high impact, because we think those kids are underserved.”
Chrisman has also made it clear that he thinks parents will agree with his vision of education. “It may be a bit rocky for a while,” he wrote in his essay about the future of education. “‘[A]s these sprawling complex systems don’t go down without a fight. But in the end, the human drive for freedom, and the desire of parents to give their children the best shot in life, will prevail.”
