No Degree In AI Or Data Science Needed To work In Tesla, Elon Musk Reveals

If we look at the quality of education these days, they are more centric towards marks on the sheet than the skills in the hands of student. And what that results in that, students have knowledge about the subject but don’t know how to apply it. If you running a billion dollars company you will definitely reject such a student.

And therefore the one common thing that blue chips companies across borders agree with, is that people who want a job at big tech firms don’t necessarily need a college degree if you have skills you are always welcome.


This week the Tesla CEO Elon Musk also confirmed the same concept. On Twitter when a user made a query and asked whether he looks for a college degree while recruiting an employee at Tesla.

In response, the Musk said that a potential applicant looking for a job at Tesla does not require a college degree to apply. He tweeted “Yes” when asked, “Do you still stand firmly on not requiring college degrees?”

This is not the first time Elon Musk has said that you don’t need to be a graduate in order to work with him. Back in a 2014 interview with Auto Build, Elon Musk said that a college degree from a great college does not tantamount to having the necessary skills for working at a big tech firm. 

In that conversation with Auto Bild, Musk had said that he looks for ‘evidence of exceptional abilities’ instead of a degree from a prestigious college while evaluating a potential employee.

“If there is a track record of exceptional achievement, then it is likely that that will continue into the future,” he had said while explaining the idea behind not explicitly requiring college degrees.

“There’s no need even to have a college degree at all, or even high school,” Musk said after being asked whether he considered which college a job applicant attended when evaluating a potential Tesla employee.”

“If somebody graduated from a great university, that may be an indication that they will be capable of great things, but it’s not necessarily the case.”

”If you look at, say, people like Bill Gates or Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs, these guys didn’t graduate from college, but if you had a chance to hire them, of course, that would be a good idea.”

Elon Musk further added that whenever he holds an interview then he asks the candidate to give a brief summary of his/her career and how they tackled & solved some of the most difficult problems in their lives.

In order to be sure that the interviewee is not taking credit for someone else’s work someone or he is not lying about their problem-solving ways, he asks them detailed questions about the problem they start to describe.

On the basis of those problems, he asks further questions and judges and analyze if the candidate is suitable for the role in question or not. Here the logic is simple: if the interviewee wasn’t responsible for solving the problem, they won’t know the answers.

Elon Musk is not the only one who doesn’t think that college degrees aren’t mandatory. Back in May, Tim Cook said that people don’t need a 4-year college degree to be a good coder.

Also, Tesla is not the first company that takes this kind of approach in there hiring process. The companies like Google, Apple, Starbucks, IBM or Bank of America also don’t ask for a degree to work for them.

Here is a list of 15 more companies that no longer require a degree.