Biography | Elon Musk — The Green Serpentine Hall Where Penn Issued Two Degrees

People treat the physics-and-business pairing as a line Musk invented for interviews. The University of Pennsylvania put both degrees on paper in this building's city. Musk transferred to Penn from Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario. He read physics in the College of Arts and Sciences and economics at the Wharton School, with concentrations in finance and entrepreneurial management. College Hall, the green serpentine pile on Woodland Walk, has been the public face of the West Philadelphia campus since 1873. It holds classrooms, the history department, and the president's offices. Penn's registrar and the university's public-affairs office later confirmed the award date that Musk himself sometimes blurred. Copies of the record show a B.A. in physics and a B.S. in economics issued in May 1997, not 1995. Snopes traced the same gap in 2022: Musk had cited 1995, the year he moved west and deferred a Stanford materials-science doctorate after two days. The coursework was largely done earlier. The diploma waited on a remaining humanities requirement, and on the certificate he needed when he later sought a visa. The Daily Pennsylvanian, citing classmates, placed him as a teaching assistant in a computer-science course and as a resident adviser in the Quadrangle, later Riepe College House. The campus is public. The pin is College Hall, not a dormitory room and not a current office. Photo: North façade of College Hall, Bestbudbrian, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Portrait: Elon Musk, Duncan Hull, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.