Elon Musk says college is 'basically for fun and not for learning' (2020)

> “I don’t consider going to college evidence of exceptional ability,” Musk said. “In fact, ideally you dropped out.”

I really doubt his and his companies' hiring practices support this claim even in the slightest.

Stem majors both times. Found English courses to be interesting and euro history courses to be particularly interesting as electives. Depended on the subject, class size and charisma of the teacher. Math courses boring as snot with bad teachers. Heavy memorization courses such as Orgo similarly boring. And it was a big school with a famous name. Grad school all in discipline so it didn’t really count.

I feel people with no sense of history really suffer when trying to discern trends and developments. Thus, learning and debating over why things happened was quite pertinent to being aware of what was going down outside. But it was much more f2f than today seems to be and that was a good thing. There were computers to play with but you could not move them and so had to share them.

Soft agree. If you're in STEM you actually learn things (or you don't pass). Those were the only classes that challenged me; the only ones from which I took anything more than trivia.

But college was realllly fun.

If I could do college over again I'd pick a major that required reading a lot of books, old and less old, to help me understand humanity better. Maybe go back further and do in high school what Ray Bradbury and Octavia Butler did--self-educate at the public library.

College is for fun and learning, and like high school before it, mostly for suffering together with others, some of whom might become friends.

Who does he hire for SpaceX? College grads or just guys who he thinks can make good rockets?

From 2020