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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
In a corner of SpaceX's headquarters in Hawthorne, California, a small, secretive group called Ad Astra is hard at work. These are not the company's usual rocket scientists. At the direction of Elon Musk, they are tackling ambitious projects involving flamethrowers, robots, nuclear politics, and defeating evil AIs.
Those at Ad Astra still find time for a quick game of dodgeball at lunch, however, because the average age within this group is just 10 years old.
Ad Astra encompasses students, not employees. For the past four years, this experimental non-profit school has been quietly educating Musk's sons, the children of select SpaceX employees, and a few high-achievers from nearby Los Angeles. It started back in 2014, when Musk pulled his five young sons out of one of Los Angeles' most prestigious private schools for gifted children. Hiring one of his sons' teachers, the CEO founded Ad Astra to "exceed traditional school metrics on all relevant subject matter through unique project-based learning experiences," according to a previously unreported document filed with the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS).
"I just didn't see that the regular schools were doing the things that I thought should be done," he told a Chinese TV station in 2015. "So I thought, well let's see what we can do. Maybe creating a school will be better."
In an atmosphere closer to a venture capital incubator than a traditional school, today's Ad Astra students undertake challenging technical projects, trade using their own currency, and can opt out of subjects they don't enjoy. Children from 7 to 14 years old work together in teams, with few formal assessments and no grades handed out.
Ad Astra's principal hopes that the school will revolutionize education in the same way Tesla has disrupted transportation, and SpaceX the rocket industry. But as Musk's sons near graduation age, the future of Ad Astra is unclear. Will Musk maintain interest in the school once his children move on? And even if he does, can a school of fewer than 40 students ever be anything more than a high-tech crèche for already-privileged children?
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 29 2018, @03:00PM (1 child)
Google didn't do anything particularly innovative. They had more servers and they didn't even bother trying to index anything correctly and then when they had enough marketshare they started engaging in illegal trade practices to shut others out.
To this day we all suffer from low-quality search engines as a result as Google still doesn't bother to properly index sites or have any idea what the pages say.
In this case Musk is somebody who should, under no circumstances, be allowed near a company. Tesla is probably going to go bankrupt in the coming recession as people get sick of waiting for orders, can't afford to pay for their order and has to compete with other businesses that are actually good investments.
(Score: 3, Informative) by frojack on Friday June 29 2018, @06:06PM
Could you please explain what "index anything correctly" means in your world?
Explain in detail how your plan works so much better that Google's (which is pretty much what all the other search engines try to do).
Why should Google bother having any idea what the "pages say". It indexes them by every word.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.