Elon Musk's Education and Move to Canada and the United States

Musk had long believed the United States was where great technology was built, and Canada offered the most practical route there. Because his mother, Maye, was born in Canada, he was able to obtain Canadian citizenship, and in June 1989 he flew to Montreal with little money and few plans.^[1][2][6][7]

For the next year he traveled between relatives and worked a series of manual jobs, including farm work in Saskatchewan and cleaning the boiler room of a lumber mill in British Columbia — a hot, dangerous job that paid well by the hour.^[1][6] His mother, brother Kimbal and sister Tosca soon joined him in Canada.^[1][2][6]

In 1990 Musk enrolled at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario.^{[1][3][10][11]} He was known on campus as an intense student who loved debating big ideas, and he earned money by selling computer parts and assembled PCs to fellow students.^[1]

Kimbal also enrolled at Queen's, and the brothers made a habit of cold-calling people they admired to request lunch meetings. One contact, Peter Nicholson, an executive at the Bank of Nova Scotia, offered Elon a summer internship and became an early mentor.^[1]

In 1992 Musk transferred to the University of Pennsylvania on a scholarship.^[1][3][11] He pursued two degrees at once: a Bachelor of Arts in physics and a Bachelor of Science in economics from the Wharton School. Both degrees were conferred in 1997.^{[1][3][8][10][12]} He has said he studied physics to understand how the universe works and business so that he would not have to work for someone who did.^[1][9]

At Penn he wrote papers that previewed his later ventures, including one on the future of solar power and another on ultracapacitors for energy storage.^[1][4] Musk has said he thought about which problems would most affect the future of humanity and concluded they were the internet, sustainable energy and making life multiplanetary — a list that maps closely onto the companies he went on to build.^[4][5][9]

He and a friend also rented a large house off campus and turned it into a weekend party venue to pay the rent, an early sign of his entrepreneurial instincts.^[1]

During the summers of his Penn years, Musk worked in California. He interned at Pinnacle Research Institute, a Los Gatos start-up researching ultracapacitors for energy storage, and at Rocket Science Games, a video-game company in Palo Alto.^[1] Both experiences brought him into direct contact with the two fields — energy and software — that would dominate his first decades in business.

In 1995 Musk was accepted into a Ph.D. program in materials science and applied physics at Stanford University, where he planned to work on energy-storage technology.^[1][3] But the internet was exploding, and he feared missing the moment. He deferred the program almost immediately — accounts say within two days — and joined his brother to found Zip2.^{[1][3][11][14][15]}

He has said he expected that if the company failed he could return to academia. It did not fail: Zip2 was sold four years later, launching one of the most remarkable entrepreneurial careers in history.^[1][2][13]