How Microschools Became the Latest Tech Mogul Obsession

WIRED

3 days ago

Aug 18, 2025 6:00 AM Between homeschool provisions in the One Big Beautiful Bill and Trump's attempts to gut the Department of Education, teaching kids looks different now. Silicon Valley's answer? Microschools. ILLUSTRATION: VIVIENNE SHAO
Elon Musk had a question: 'Does anybody have any experience with first principles analysis?' He was speaking to a room full of kids, many of whom knew Musk as the CEO of companies that made rockets and cool-looking cars—and as the founder of Ad Astra, the microschool they attended in his Bel Air mansion, per a video posted by the YouTube channel Newsthink. To five of them, he was simply 'Dad.'
In 2014, Musk reportedly pulled his children out of the elite Mirman School in Los Angeles and recruited one of their teachers to help him build an alternative school unbound by conventional curriculum standards. Students at Ad Astra studied nuclear chemistry in middle school, completed independent engineering projects, and listened to lectures from successful tech executives between classes. Kierra Wang, who says she attended Ad Astra's middle school at the same time as Musk's triplets, recalls entering college-level hackathons by eighth grade. She credited Ad Astra with giving her not just the knowledge to compete with kids much older than her but also the 'gall and confidence' to lie about her age to get in.
With Ad Astra, Musk became an early pioneer in the emerging microschooling movement. Loosely defined as schools with fewer than 150 students, microschools often operate for profit, and outside the regulatory frameworks that govern traditional public schools. According to a 2024 RAND estimate, somewhere between 750,000 and 2.1 million students in the US are being educated in some form of microschool. Silicon Valley is playing an integral role.
As he has had more children, Musk has expanded his educational footprint, funding a venture led by a California-based company called Xplor Education to create a Montessori-style school in Bastrop, Texas, where several of Musk's companies are based. His efforts have helped inspire other members of the tech elite to follow suit. Xplor also helped open a Montessori preschool on the Hawaiian island of Lanai, which is largely owned by Larry Ellison, the billionaire cofounder of Oracle. One Lanai local said that Ellison's own children are enrolled there.
In 2023 the investors Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel reportedly took to the stage at the exclusive Sun Valley conference in Idaho to urge fellow tech heavyweights to homeschool their children. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and AngelList cofounder Naval Ravikant have helped fund alternative education companies.
Even billionaires on the more liberal end of the political spectrum, like Netflix cofounder Reed Hastings and Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates, have established themselves as major donors in the school-choice movement, which aims to redirect tax dollars toward options beyond traditional public schools. (They would be wise to try to learn from other moguls' efforts, like Mark Zuckerberg's $100 million attempt to reform the public school system in Newark, New Jersey, or the upcoming shuttering of the two San Francisco Bay Area schools he helped open for low-income families.)
The push for education alternatives appeals to Silicon Valley parents on a number of levels. Many are autodidacts who struggled with the social expectations of a traditional school environment. Others looked over their kids' shoulders during Covid-era Zoom schooling and didn't like what they saw. Tech elites who grew increasingly alienated from so-called 'woke' culture began seeking fresh options that felt more politically and culturally aligned.
Silicon Valley parents are looking at traditional educational institutions and thinking, 'This is ridiculous. Why would we do things the old fashioned way?' says Michael Strong, the founder of the alternative education program The Socratic Experience. He explains that many believe their high-achieving children are being held back by rigid curricula that don't allow for accelerated learning. 'The idea is, if kids can learn faster in two hours, why not?' says Strong.
As generative AI grows increasingly integrated into our daily lives, these trends are likely to spread. Microschools are already leaning on AI tutors to provide onscreen, individualized lessons for each student, while reserving classroom time for hands-on activities and socialization. According to the consulting firm Precedence Research, the global market for AI in education is expected to grow from $7.05 billion in 2025 to $112.3 billion by 2034.
These visions are also deeply entwined with the techno-libertarian philosophy of the 'exit,' which consists of opting out of broken systems and building parallel alternatives in the private sector. It's the same logic that has given rise to cryptocurrency, charter cities, and other decentralization movements.
Josh Cowen, a professor of education policy at Michigan State University and author of The Privateers: How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers , calls school voucher programs, which allow parents to access public funds to pay for private schools, 'the Bitcoin of the education world.' Cowen is now running for Congress in his home state of Michigan on an anti-privatization platform. He believes that the broader public will pay the cost as elites continue to fence themselves off from the rest of society.
'You remove yourself from these big structural systems, whether it's banking or health care or schools, and you just say, 'You're on your own,'' he says. 'It works well for some people, but it doesn't work for most people.'
In some ways, today's microschools are an evolution of the 'pandemic pods' that exploded in popularity among wealthy families in 2020. In others, they're part of a much older political project. Critics of the school choice movement often argue it was born in the 1950s in direct response to Brown v. Board of Education , allowing white families to avoid desegregated public schools. Today it is framed as a way to improve efficiency in education and empower parents across the socioeconomic spectrum to make choices according to their children's unique needs. In practice, it enables wealthy families who are already more likely to choose private education to take public education dollars with them.
The broader push to privatize education logged some big wins this summer. A provision in President Donald Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill introduced the first-ever federal tax credit for those who donate to educational scholarships and expanded a tax-advantage account program to include homeschooling expenses. The legislation was passed this July. Just days later, the Supreme Court cleared the way for the Trump administration to dismantle the Department of Education entirely—a move the current Secretary of Education, the World Wrestling Entertainment magnate Linda McMahon, has made central to her agenda.
To date, 33 states offer some form of private school choice program, which can be used for a variety of expenses that include software and online education. Dozens more bills are making their way through state legislatures to continue expanding these options. A growing edtech industry has emerged to capitalize on these opportunities, attracting the interest of Silicon Valley investors—and further incentivizing them to take an interest in education policy.
'Technology is the backbone of the education choice movement,' Katherine Boyle, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, told an audience at the American Enterprise Institute this winter. Boyle cofounded the firm's American Dynamism fund, which focuses on defense tech, education, and other sectors it considers to be in the national interest. 'We must continue to fund education innovation in the private sector to ensure that technology reaches parents faster,' she said.
Andreessen Horowitz's portfolio includes alternative education platforms like Wonderschool and Altitude, as well as Odyssey, a platform that helps families access state funding for alternative schooling. Other companies in this space like Primer, Prenda, and Outschool have also raised hundreds of millions of dollars from venture capital.
Meanwhile, Musk's own influence continues to expand beyond his small circle of billionaire friends. Ad Astra has splintered into several for-profit companies offering online education alternatives, including Astra Nova and Synthesis. Alpha School, a microschool known for its use of personalized AI tutors, has opened locations in tech hubs like Austin, Miami, and Brownsville, Texas—home of SpaceX's Starbase headquarters—and has plans to expand to a dozen other cities this year.
As for the types of graduates these schools churn out, there's little doubt about what types of careers they'll end up in. Wang has already raised funding for her AI dermatology startup, Remedy. She said that just about all of her Ad Astra classmates have opted to study some combination of business and computer science in college. She paused, remembering some exceptions: an alumna who is going to ballet school, and 'one person is doing UX as opposed to coding.'