A man rides his bicycle near a mural that was in part funded by the Elon Musk Foundation donations to help revitalize downtown Brownsville, Texas.

You and I helped pay for Elon Musk’s kids’ private school.

That’s just one of the distressing takeaways from a lengthy March report on the tech multibillionaire’s kooky philanthropic foundation, which in recent years has disbursed money haphazardly to causes as disparate as fixing the water crisis in Flint, Mich., to planting one million trees with Youtube personality Mr. Beast to revitalizing the downtown of Brownsville, Texas.

And then there’s Ad Astra, the nonprofit school that Musk founded, maybe just for his offspring. In its first year, the private academy was one of the foundation’s grant recipients; at that time, five of the school’s 14 students were Musk’s children. (Many of the others were the kids of SpaceX execs.)

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This would be acceptable if it weren’t for the fact that Musk is essentially using American tax dollars to help fund it. That’s because philanthropic foundations can and often do serve as giant tax shelters for the ultra-wealthy. As the New York Times recently reported, the Musk Foundation received its largest single gift in 2021 when Musk donated a batch of Tesla stock worth $5.7 billion.........

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