Musk Institute
Michael Faraday never went to university. At fourteen he was apprenticed to a bookbinder and taught himself out of the books that passed through his hands. There are still people like that. Nobody is looking for them.
Origin
In December 2024, Elon Musk's father, Errol Graham Musk, was invited to Dubai. He went to meet the royal families of several emirates — in Fujairah, and in Abu Dhabi.
On December 9, the UAE state news agency WAM reported that the Crown Prince of Fujairah, Sheikh Mohammed bin Hamad bin Mohammed Al Sharqi, had received Errol Musk at the Emiri Diwan in Fujairah, where the two discussed energy, technology, trade, and future cooperation and investment.
By Errol's own account in interviews, one of those meetings had around twenty people in the room, somewhere he describes as a palatial place. A young sheikh — a “very smart young Sheikh,” in his words — asked him, out of nowhere:
What's next on the agenda?
What he was really asking was this: what is Elon Musk's next move? Or rather — what does Elon think the next move is for the human race?
Errol says the question caught him off guard, and that he answered it as an engineer. If humanity is really going to reach the future you see in science fiction — vehicles that lift off the ground, move freely, go out into space — then building better and better rockets is not enough. A rocket is still movement in three dimensions. The real work is research into space-time travel, and conquering gravity.
Someone in the room asked what he was going to call this research institute.
Errol said he had no idea.
The reply: Why don't you call it the Musk Institute?
The way Errol describes it now: So it came about by itself.
They kept going: what sort of place would you need? Off the top of his head, Errol said something like a three-storey office building, with enough parking.
He remembers that within days people were driving him around Dubai and Abu Dhabi to look at three-storey office buildings — buildings that seemed ready to move straight into.
Even he was surprised at how quickly it went. He makes a point of adding: That was in December.
The chain of thought
A young sheikh asks “what's next?”Meaning: what comes after rockets.
Errol thinks of transport in science fiction.Vehicles that lift off, move freely, leave the atmosphere.
He decides a rocket is still three-dimensional movement.Refining the rockets we have will never get you to that future.
So he proposes space-time — travel in the fourth dimension.He says it again and again: not time travel, space-time travel — travelling in four dimensions.
Gravity is one of the central obstacles.Which makes conquering gravity and studying space-time two sides of one problem.
It needs a science place.Not a university. A place.
Go and find the “undiscovered Faradays.”Never mind the CV — look for ideas that are genuinely strange and genuinely original.
Someone in the room suggests the name Musk Institute.Within days they are viewing buildings. Then the press gets hold of it.
Understand the fourth dimension and gravity well enough to use them, and Earth to Mars might not take months of flight at all.
Milestones
The royal meetings, the question, the name, the building tours within days. Errol says the whole thing “came about by itself.”
Around December 16, the same story surfaced across Middle Eastern media all at once. The original source appears to have been an Arabian Business interview with Errol; Finance Middle East, Expat Media, Al Khaleej and much of the Dubai press followed.
The version that ran was this: Elon Musk plans to spend a billion dollars building a Musk Institute in Dubai — some outlets had it funded entirely out of Elon's personal fortune. The reports came with oddly specific details: a three-storey building; researchers and students able to work and live inside it; a very Musk-ish hamburger vending machine; and a Musk Prize, meant to become something like a Nobel for science.
But that was the press talking. Errol says Elon and Kimbal rang him after they saw the coverage to ask whether the Musk Institute had anything to do with them. His answer: No, it's something I'm doing.
In a long interview with Fortune, Errol said plainly that the Musk Institute is a new project of his own, conceived in December 2024.
In the long MJP interview, Errol tells the whole thing — the sheikh, the palace, space-time, gravity, the naming, the buildings. It is still the most valuable primary source there is.
Reuters reported that Errol had gone to Bosnia and Herzegovina to look at a new site for the institute. By then he had boiled the Musk Institute's core research down to four words:
longevity · fusion · space-time · gravity
He told Reuters the UAE had already offered him a site, but that he had since come to find Bosnia attractive; he had also looked at Serbia and Austria.
Speaking at the Russian venture capital forum in Kazan, Russia, Errol again said publicly that the Musk Institute's central task is to work on humanity's biggest problems — space-time, gravity, nuclear fusion. The Russian side began discussing a Musk Institute in Kazan, Russia.
The Moscow Times reported further: the original billion-dollar Dubai plan never came off, while the talks in Kazan, Russia had reached a more concrete stage. Quite how far Elon himself is involved remains unclear.
Two years of hunting for a site: Dubai, Bosnia, Kazan, Russia. From this stop on, the order reverses — people first.
The China chapter starts in Shanghai, travelling the country with members of the community. It is also the first stop of Walking the World.
Milestones
| Date | Source | What matters in it | Level of evidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2024-12-09 | WAM / Aletihad, official report of the royal meeting | The Crown Prince of Fujairah formally receives Errol | Tier A, official |
| 2024-12-16 | Finance Middle East | A billion dollars, gravity, fusion, Dubai | Press paraphrasing Errol |
| 2024-12-16 | Al Khaleej | Arabic-language coverage in the same window | Press paraphrase |
| 2025-01-30 | Fortune, long-form interview | Errol dates the idea for the Institute to December | High-value independent media |
| 2025-02 | MJP, full-length interview | Sheikh, palace, space-time, gravity, the naming, the buildings — the full origin | The key first-hand account |
| 2025-07-24 | Reuters, Bosnia report | The four fields: longevity / fusion / space-time / gravity | Credible independent reporting |
| 2026-05 | Moscow Times follow-up | Dubai plan never landed; Kazan, Russia under discussion | Independent follow-up |
| 2026-10 | Shanghai, China | The China chapter opens; travelling China with the community | This project |
Vision
This is where the Musk Institute differs most from an ordinary research institute.
The standard method: define the problems, post the jobs, pick the best CVs in the pile. Errol's idea is the exact opposite — go and find the people the conventional research system is unlikely to recognise, but who genuinely have strange ideas and original minds.
His examples are Michael Faraday and Einstein. He believes there are still plenty of unknown Michael Faradays out there — “undiscovered Faradays” — who simply have never been found.
What Errol described were adults nobody has found yet. What we are looking for are the “undiscovered Faradays” at every age — children and teenagers first, then the young, the middle-aged, the old.
Including children is new to this version of the idea, and we think it is the part that matters most — because a grown Faraday can at least speak for himself. An eight-year-old can't.
In the 1970s he was an engineer. In the 1980s he brought an engineer's world into Elon's childhood. In 1995 he put money into his son's first company. In 2002 he watched his son start building rockets. And in 2024, at seventy-eight, Errol started asking it again: what comes after rockets?
New chapter
Get the world's “undiscovered Faradays” into contact with each other — meeting in different cities, or meeting online. It can be one narrow problem, discussed once. It can be nothing more than someone saying out loud what they think about, what their story is, what they're happy about and what hurts right now — to us, and to everyone.
Who we're looking for
Of course we want the “undiscovered Faradays” among the young, the middle-aged and the old. But the ones we want most are the ones who are still children and teenagers.
Because there must be a great many kids out there who really can hold 3.5-dimensional, even four-dimensional space in their heads — and have no language to say it in.
Or worse: their parents and their teachers, working from the education system and its rules as they stand, grind the gift out of them a little at a time.
“3.5 dimensions,” “four dimensions” — those phrases are probably wrong to begin with. Our brains aren't that kind of brain, and our language has no words that describe one. Which is exactly the problem: a gift that can't be articulated is the easiest thing in the world to mistake for a defect.
It's their parents, their teachers, their relatives and friends.
A ten-year-old is not going to come find us. A parent who thinks “there's something different about my kid, and the school says there's something wrong with him” will.
What we want first is a community with enough reach to carry the idea. In a line: make contact first.
Method
It doesn't sound like something a research institute ought to be doing. It is the most effective method we can come up with.
First, you meet a lot of people when you travel. A call for applications posted from an office reaches the people already inside academia — which is to say, precisely the people who have already been found. Go out, and you meet the ones who were never on the list.
Second, travel video travels. We'll film these journeys and put them on social media. What spreads isn't the scenery, it's the idea: if there's a child near you who can't explain what he's thinking about, but you can tell he's different, tell us.
The two are the same thing seen from either side — trading a journey worth sharing for a chance at finding someone.
The choice isn't arbitrary.
Elon Musk travelled abroad with his father more than ten times before he turned eighteen. For that era, that means a family that could take a child out of the country a dozen times over. He grew up with a lot of sky over him — a farm, horses, a tennis court, and an engineer for a father who'd pick up a wrench and fix a car, an engine, a plane.
On November 18, 2023, Elon invited his father to one of his rocket launches. At the party afterwards he said that his greatest successes came out of his engineering mind and his engineering skills, and that he had his father to thank for them.
So Walking the World is the first course. Not because it's fun — because how much of the world a person can imagine depends on how much of it he has seen.
Walking the World · longevity
One of the Musk Institute's four directions is longevity.
It's usually taken to mean laboratory work — cells, metabolism, drugs, genes. We don't dispute any of that. It just isn't all of it.
We treat Walking the World as a practice of longevity.
So Walking the World does two jobs here: it is how we look for the “undiscovered Faradays,” and it is the Musk Institute's first attempt at putting longevity into practice.
A man of seventy-nine taking a crowd of people around the world — that in itself is a sample of the research.
About the domain
ASI stands for artificial superintelligence.
Not the models we have now, the ones that write essays, answer questions, produce code. Those are tools. ASI means intelligence that surpasses the strongest human minds across almost every field.
Nobody knows whether it's coming, when, or who builds it.
If ASI really does arrive, what produces it is unlikely to be a consensus reached in a conference room.
Consensus can only push along what is already on the rails. A genuine leap has almost always come from someone nobody understood at the time — a bookbinder's apprentice who never went to university, a third-class examiner at a patent office.
So our guess is this: it may be that only these “undiscovered Faradays” can ever actually deliver ASI.
That's what the domain means. What we're doing right now is a great deal humbler than that — find the people first.
The first year
No open admissions.The founding cohort comes entirely from members of our AI glasses. The first 1,000, and no more.
There is no real curriculum.The only course is travelling with Errol Musk — China, Japan, Southeast Asia, Brazil, Russia, Dubai and the rest of the Middle East. China is the first stop.
No fundraising, no commercial activity of any kind.In the first year we charge members nothing whatsoever for any of this travel.
Members pay their own way.Think of it as a group that assembles voluntarily, with Errol Musk leading it. Errol's costs are covered in full by the AI glasses platform.
Each city's itinerary is organised by the community itself.Plans and details to follow.
All of this travel has one purpose: to carry the search for the “undiscovered Faradays” out into the world, and to actually find them on the road.
How to take part
Take the SpaceX launch viewing in the United States as an example. Every AI glasses member gathers in our WeChat group first. Anyone planning to go talks it over there in advance — how to get there, where to go together while in the States, how to shape the days. Errol Musk leads the group on the trip itself.
We'll also get people talking over Tencent Meeting and other online channels well before departure.
The place is transferable. If you have one and can't go, you can sell it on.
Summer 2027
Over the summer of 2027 we're organising a trip to Starbase, Texas, to watch a Starship Heavy launch.
Which launch, and which day, can only be settled close to the date. SpaceX's cadence keeps shifting, and any date pinned down a year ahead isn't worth believing. We'll tell you the moment it's certain.
The good news: Starship's launch rate is climbing fast, and Musk's stated target is at least one a day within the year. Which makes going to Texas to see a launch a surer thing than it has ever been — you're no longer betting on a window that opens once every few months.
The VIP Rocket Launch party brings in former SpaceX executives and engineers. For a sense of the routes and the visits themselves, see this video:
Flights, hotels, food, local transport, visas and insurance. We don't arrange any of it; you book it yourself.
Faraday was apprenticed to a bookbinder at fourteen, and taught himself out of the books that passed through his hands.
We don't know where today's are. So we're setting out to look for them.