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Comment by the_rosentotter | Hacker News Reader

> I don't doubt he's capable of doing that with his background

Which background is that? He has an undergraduate degree in economics and a bachelor's degree in physics.

I respect the guy but he clearly puts a lot into managing his image. As a relevant example, he used to claim to have been in the Ph.D. program at Stanford, but had to retract that (I leave it as an exercise to the reader to find that on Google).

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I met Elon just after he raised $3M for Zip2[1]. He had moved to Palo Alto to enroll at Stanford, but then got sidetracked into Zip2 (later sold for $300M+). The company was about 8 people in one small room at the time.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zip2

>undergraduate degree in economics and a bachelor's degree in physics.

I'm in the UK my understanding is a bachelor's is a synonym for an undergraduate degree; so why did you use the different terms here?

Ah, I think I see it: you copied from Wikipedia; wherein it says he did a bachelors degree in Economics (BA?) and a further bachelors in physics (BS/BSc) whilst he was a graduate. Two undergraduate degrees.

Other sources suggest he did the degrees coterminously:

>"Musk graduated from UPenn in 1994, with double bachelor degrees in Physics (from the College of Arts and Sciences) and Economics (from the Wharton School)." (http://studyadvantage.co/elon-musk-education-study/)

That sources says he had 2 days in a PhD program.

https://www.wharton.upenn.edu/academic-programs/ suggests he did what they call a "dual degree". Making Wikipedia wrong, he didn't "stay" for his second degree he did the two together.

I'm very curious about the Stanford thing. Do you mean that he was never admitted? Or simply that he never officially enrolled?

I tried my hand at googling this but found nothing but re-hashes of the same story of how he left after two days.

I couldn't find anything either.

My guess would be that you aren't technically in the PhD program until you've passed your qualifying exam. Until that point, you're a graduate student but not a PhD student. After you pass your preliminary exam, you're a PhD/Doctoral candidate.

Also, it's a moot point. There are no bragging rights to be found in simply being admitted to a PhD program. Plenty of very intelligent people fail to complete a PhD program (usually, IME, because of personality issues/conflict with the advisor (sadly extremely common), inflexibility of the advisor and/or department, or personal reasons (economic, social, health)).

(to be clear, Musk didn't brag that he was admitted to Stanford - he suggested that he felt dropping out was more useful than continuing. His fans often hold up being admitted to a PhD program as evidence of his engineering background)

In the USA, this is how it typically works. People who are enrolled in PhD programs are called "PhD students." Once they pass their advancement to candidacy exam, they are called "PhD Candidates." In both cases, they are enrolled in a PhD program. Typically people are accepted directly to PhD programs and they are not just admitted as generic graduate students.

I remember reading in Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future something that Elon had been formally admitted to the PhD program at Stanford, but dropped out after three days. Vance contacted the Registrar's Office (or the graduate department itself?, I cannot remember) and received the confirmation that he was admitted.

He wanted to work on super capacitors in his PhD, but he realized that somebody would work on it anyways, and it's better for him to work on Paypal.

Watch the video of Sal Khan(fron Khan Academy) interviewing Elon musk.

Mostly right :). He actually thought it better to be involved in creating an internet company. This led to the founding of Zip2 (a kind of precursor to Yelp whose pivots ended up trying to help newspapers get online). The money from that led to the founding of X (think, transaction), which later took over and ultimately merged with its competitor, PayPal.

I second the recommendation of watching the interview. There is way too much misinformation surrounding Tesla and Elon Musk.

Yes, I recall him saying something similar. I was writing from my memory.

The biography of Elon Musk by Ashlee Vance talks about this. Which I recommend everybody read. I don't remember the details but I think he was admitted but not enrolled. He ended up not going because he thought pursuing an internet company in Silicon Valley was more valuable than research work at the time.

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