The Musk Institute
We give ¥10 to it from every pair of glasses we sell. This page says what it is, and what the first 1,000 buyers receive.
The Musk Institute was founded personally by Elon Musk's father, Errol Musk. It has nothing to do with Elon Musk himself, and it has no connection to SpaceX, Tesla or xAI.
MYSK is not tied to it as a brand, there is no co-branding, and there is no endorsement of any kind. There are exactly two links, and both are on this page: a donation, and a trip.
In December 2024 a wave of reports said Elon was putting a billion dollars into a Musk Institute in Dubai. That was the press paraphrasing, not a fact. Errol says Elon and Kimbal read the reports and telephoned to ask him about it; his answer was that this is something he is doing himself.
So this page covers three things: what the Institute is, who the money goes to, and what that place held by the first 1,000 buyers actually is.
¥10 to the InstituteFor every pair of MYSK sold we give ¥10 to the Musk Institute. It is the only money that moves between us.
¥10 to the catsThe same pair also puts ¥10 into the MYSK stray cat fund. Which grassroots rescues it finally reaches is decided together by the 30 launch partners, and the accounts are public.
No capNo sales tier, no sliding scale, no ceiling. However many pairs go out, that is how many donations follow.
No projectionsWe do not write sentences like "a million pairs over three years comes to this much". Something that has not happened is not worth doing arithmetic on.
In December 2024 Errol Musk was invited to Dubai, where he met the royal families of several emirates.
By his own account in interviews, one of those meetings held about twenty people. A man he described as a very smart young sheikh suddenly asked him:
What's next on the agenda?
What he was really asking was: what is Elon Musk's next step — or rather, what does Elon think the next step for humanity is?
Errol says the question caught him off guard, and that he answered as an engineer: if people are really going to reach the future in the science-fiction films — vehicles that lift off, move freely, even go into outer space — then simply making rockets better is not enough. A rocket is still movement in three dimensions. What has to be worked on is the study of space and time, and conquering gravity.
Someone in the room asked what he was going to call this institute. Errol said he did not know. The reply was: why not call it the Musk Institute?
His own description of how it happened afterwards: it came about by itself.
They asked him what sort of premises he would need. Off the cuff he said a three-storey office building, with enough parking. Within days local people were driving him around to look at buildings. The search for a site then ran for two years — Dubai, Bosnia, and on to Kazan in Russia. From the stop in China onwards the order is reversed: find the people first.
LongevityNot only cells, metabolism and drugs in a laboratory. Keeping moving, entering unfamiliar places, walking with other people — all of that belongs to this one.
FusionThe energy end of it. Of the four, this is the one closest to engineering that already exists.
SpacetimeWhat Errol says over and over is this: not time travel — travelling in four dimensions.
GravityHe takes this to be one of the central obstacles. To him, spacetime and gravity are two faces of one thing.
Michael Faraday never went to university. At fourteen he was apprenticed to a bookbinder and taught himself from the books he bound for other people, and he became one of the most important experimental physicists of his century.
The usual way to run a research institute is to set the subjects, post the openings, and pick the best-looking CVs. Errol's idea is the exact opposite — go and find the people the conventional research system may never recognise, who genuinely hold strange and original ideas. He believes there are many of them in the world and that they have simply never been found. He calls them the "undiscovered Faradays".
What Errol described first were the adults nobody had found yet. What this version of the idea adds is children and teenagers.
The reason is blunt: a grown Faraday can at least speak for himself. An eight-year-old cannot.
There must be a great many children in this world who really can build four-dimensional space inside their heads — and who have no language in which to say so.
Or worse: their parents and their teachers, working from the education system and the rules as they stand, wear that gift away a little at a time.
Saying "four dimensions" may itself be inaccurate. Our brains are not that kind of brain, and our language currently has no word that truly describes a mind like that. That is exactly where the problem lies.
They are also their parents, their teachers, their relatives and their friends. A ten-year-old will not come to us. But a parent thinking "there is something different about this child of mine, and the school says he has a problem" will.
The first step is a plain one: make contact.
No open admissionsThe first cohort is drawn entirely from people who bought MYSK, capped at the first 1,000.
No coursesThe one thing on the programme is travelling the world with Errol Musk. China first, then Japan, Dubai and Southeast Asia.
No fundraisingIn the first year the cohort is charged nothing at all for these trips, and no commercial activity of any kind is run.
Members pay their own wayIt amounts to a voluntary group trip with Errol Musk leading it. All of Errol's costs are carried by us and are not spread across anyone in the cohort.
The community plans itHow each city is done, where to go, where to stay, is worked out among the members themselves. We are not a travel agency.
This is the second link between MYSK and the Institute: the first 1,000 buyers of the glasses also take a place in the Musk Institute's first cohort.
The place is transferable. If you cannot go yourself, you can pass it to someone else.
Launch partners number 30. Three arrive each week off the creators' weekly invite board, and they are trustees of the Musk Institute. Which rescues the stray cat fund finally reaches is decided by those 30 together.
The first cohort is the first 1,000 people to buy a pair, and what they hold is the right to travel the world with Errol Musk, transferable. One is a trustee, the other is a member of a cohort — the count, the way they are chosen and what they hold all differ, and nowhere on this site are the two written as one.
During the summer of 2027 we are organising one rocket launch viewing at Starbase in Texas. Starbase sits beside Boca Chica Beach, near Brownsville.
Which launch it is, and on what day, can only be fixed close to the time. SpaceX's schedule moves constantly and no date pinned a year ahead is credible. We will tell you the moment we can be sure.
We waive the organising fee, the local guide and fixer costs, and the cost of the viewing party; flights, hotels, meals, local transport, visas and insurance are yours.
The Musk Institute was founded by Elon Musk's father, Errol Musk. It has nothing to do with Elon Musk himself, and it has no connection to SpaceX, Tesla or xAI.
Everywhere this page gives Errol's own views, those are what he has said in public interviews. The billion-dollar investment by Elon reported by parts of the press in December 2024 was the press paraphrasing, and is not a fact.
Faraday was apprenticed to a bookbinder at fourteen and taught himself from the books he bound.
Where those people are today we do not know. So we are setting out to find them.