Education
An ornate school building
Musk graduated from Pretoria Boys High School in South Africa.
Musk attended Waterkloof House Preparatory School, Bryanston High School, and then Pretoria Boys High School, where he graduated.[33] Musk was a good but unexceptional student, earning a 61 in Afrikaans and a B on his senior math certification.[34] Musk applied for a Canadian passport through his Canadian-born mother to avoid South Africa's mandatory military service,[35][36] which would have forced him to participate in the apartheid regime,[2] as well as to ease his path to immigration to the United States.[37] While waiting for his application to be processed, he attended the University of Pretoria for five months.[38]
Musk arrived in Canada in June 1989, connected with a second cousin in Saskatchewan,[39] and worked odd jobs including at a farm and a lumber mill.[40] In 1990, he entered Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario.[41][42] Two years later, he transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied until 1995.[43] Although Musk has said that he earned his degrees in 1995, the University of Pennsylvania did not award them until 1997 – a Bachelor of Arts in physics and a Bachelor of Science in economics from the university's Wharton School.[44][45][46][47][48] He reportedly hosted large, ticketed house parties to help pay for tuition, and wrote a business plan for an electronic book-scanning service similar to Google Books.[49]