March 08, 2021

Here's why Elon Musk supports a future with free education for the planet

Sal Khan, the founder of Khan Academy, recently gave a big shout-out to Elon Musk and the Musk Foundation for a generous donation of $5 million. Khan admires Elon Musk’s efforts and support in spreading free education for everyone on the planet.

Above: The Illuminated Tweets of Elon Musk. Editorial illustrations meets a coloring book. (Source: Ill Ink / Twitter)

With this sizable donation, Khan Academy will be able to accelerate the creation of all sorts of educational content, freely available for humanity. In addition to the currently available courses, Khan Academy aspires to cater to all educational levels from Kindergarten to college courses.

This has some personal meaning for me. I recently started learning Electrical Engineering at Khan Academy. I enrolled in this particular Khan Academy course to better understand sustainable energy and electric vehicles. There are billions of people around the globe who can benefit from Khan Academy and their funding support from Musk Foundation.

While Musk supports free online learning for all, he's also helping pioneer the Ad Astra and Astra Nova schools to push education into the future. Other schools, like the Synthesis School, have taken inspiration from Musk's Ad Astra concept and brought it online as well.

However, in the age of the internet, all schools need to be connected. So the Musk Foundation also recently contributed to Giga Connect, a UNICEF initiative, whose goal is to connect every school across the globe to the internet.

At the end of the day, Khan Academy will be able to us their particular grant from the Musk Foundation to help make learning science, engineering, and all the other subjects more engaging and user-friendly, according to Khan.

"We [have] the budget of a large high school, but our aspirations are to serve the globe," explains Khan.

According to Khan, the Khan Academy has 120 million registered users as of today and 20-30 million students actively learning from the platform every month — this equates to 200-300 million hours of learning per year. Khan Academy is making a huge impact on current and future generations who want to learn without bounds.

It turns out that Khan got a chance to do an in-depth, one-on-one interview with Elon Musk back in 2013 (see below). It must've made an impact on Elon and the two seemed to have developed a good rapport with one another. More recently, Khan posted a video expressing his sincere gratitude as a result of Musk's recent donation.