Evan Sprinkle was enjoying his breakfast on a sunny hotel patio in San Diego, when he noticed he was attracting glances from a nearby table. Eventually, a man came over and asked if he could buy the sweater off Sprinkle’s back.
Sprinkle politely declined the proposition, but he cites the incident as an example of how weird his job occasionally gets these days.
Sprinkle is the dean of undergraduate admissions for the longtime North Carolina college, Elon University. He wears university apparel whenever he travels, as a way to advertise the school and recruit interested students. That day Sprinkle was wearing his favorite Elon University sweater.
The man wanted to buy the sweater because he thought it was referencing Elon Musk. He found it funny and wanted to wear it around California.
Elon University, of course, has no relationship to Elon Musk. It’s a private college near Raleigh, North Carolina that’s been around since 1889. The word “Elon” is the Hebrew word for oak, which relates to the oak trees on campus.
But that stops no one from mistaking the two. Sprinkle’s interaction with the California man is just one of the countless cases of mistaken identity that Elon University students, faculty and alumni regularly encounter with regard to the famous tech entrepreneur, who is the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, and—depending on the day—the wealthiest, or second wealthiest, person in the world.
Sprinkle’s office is accustomed to having random people inquire about the school's relationship with Musk. They have a ready-to-go explanation for the many times people in hotels, airports or restaurants ask. Aside from the sweater guy, the questions are typically mild curiosity from strangers about Elon University, which Sprinkle tries to use to boost the University, he said.
“Our office doesn’t shy away from that connection, too. Because I think it’s obvious that people are going to naturally make that connection,” Sprinkle said.
When the school emails prospective students each Spring, for example, the famous namesake in tech provides a chance for the school to display some wit and stand out from all the other college pitches. “We may not be able to buy you a social media platform or offer you a ticket to space,” reads the email, “but the value of an Elon education is arguably just as good.”
The erroneous Elon association has created a shared, if accidental, bond connecting current and former students of the university, akin to a group of people being named Michael Jordan or George Washington.
The Elon Musk name "totally took over"
Liz White, a 2013 alumni, had never even heard of Elon Musk until his popularity started to rise.
“The first time I heard of Tesla and Elon Musk, I didn’t think anything of it,” White said, adding she just thought it was random and funny that he had the same name. But then it never stopped.
“When you’re searching on Twitter for anything Elon-related now, all that comes up is Elon Musk,” White said. “It just kind of totally took over.”
One haunting moment came on a dating app—a match excitedly messaged White thinking her bio (mentioning Elon University) was a joke indicating her adulation for Elon Musk. She promptly unmatched with the person, but the joke is now an infamous moment for White and her friends.
William Eberhardt, a proud business student at Elon U who gives tours of the campus, says that visitors regularly ask him if there’s any relation to Elon Musk. He sometimes wonders if people think he’s affiliated with Musk when he sends emails from his student email that ends with “@elon.edu.”
It’s not the craziest notion. After all, top U.S. universities like Carnegie Mellon and Duke bear the name of famous industrialists. And some of today’s tech elite have launched their own eponymous schools, such as venture capitalist Tim Draper’s private, for-profit Draper University in San Mateo, Calif.
In 2018, Musk helped feed the confusion himself when he tweeted an April Fools joke with a photo of him in a t-shirt with a partially-obscured Elon University logo. In the comments, Musk responded to one Tweet by saying “Elon University is a real place.”
The incident inspired Elon University to create a post with the hashtag, #GetElontoElon, in which professors and students touted the various perks, including nearby Tesla charging stations, that the billionaire would discover on a hoped-for visit. As far as anyone knows, Musk has yet to take the school up on its offer.
Hey @elonmusk, love your Elon shirt and your April Fools post. Drop by if you're in the neighborhood. #getelontoelon pic.twitter.com/4pwK1h2tF5
— Elon University (@elonuniversity) April 2, 2018
Besides the tweeting, Elon University has made no formal or informal effort to connect with Elon Musk, or to solicit a financial contribution from the multi-billionaire, according to Owen Covington, the communications officer for Elon University. Tesla did not respond to a request for comment regarding its CEO's thoughts on the university.
A love-hate relationship
As Musk’s reputation has evolved from being a maverick entrepreneur with a thing for Mars to a feisty provocateur at the front lines of the culture wars, the inadvertent link between the university and the billionaire has become more complicated.
White, the 2013 alum, said she’s stopped wearing sweatshirts that say only “Elon” because of the increasing association with the controversial Musk.
“It’s a bummer because I feel like Elon University was getting such a good reputation,” White said. “... and I feel like this Elon Musk association kind of takes that recognition down a notch, which is unfortunate.”
Wore an Elon golf shirt to work a couple months ago and somebody (who knew it was a school) asked “isn’t it embarrassing to wear that these days?” 😭
— Brennan McGovern (@brennanmcgovern) July 12, 2023
Eberhardt, the campus tour guide, acknowledges the double-edged nature of the shared name.
“I haven't thought that it has reflected badly, definitely not in the past, but … with him being a polarizing, definitely somewhat controversial figure, I do wonder now if it’s having repercussions on the school,” Eberhardt said. Still, he joked, maybe the association will result in a large donation from Musk.
Other students are simply tired of the jokes. “POV: You’re an Elon University student who just heard the 7,584,391th Elon Musk joke of the day,” read a past post on Fizz, a social networking platform for college students. The post, by Ryan Kupperman, a journalism student and a managing editor at Elon University’s school news network, received 200 upvotes.
It's not as if Elon University doesn't have its own reputation to stand on: It’s ranked among the top 100 National Universities by U.S. News & World Report, and was ranked the nation's top school for undergraduate teaching, ahead of Brown University and Princeton University. Its 7,000 students come from all over the country to study the more than 70 undergraduate majors and graduate programs, including a law school, on a 690-acre campus that includes Elon University Forest, a 56-acre land preserve for scientific research. The school’s athletic teams (the school mascot is a phoenix) compete in several Division 1 sports.
Yet even people who study business are occasionally surprised by the extent to which the tech CEO has changed the perception of the school. Christy Benson, a longtime business professor at Elon University, recently experienced one Elon comparison that made her realize just how far-reaching Musk’s popularity stretches.
Benson recently traveled to Singapore and Thailand with a group of students. While touring a manufacturing facility, the group of students was given "red carpet" treatment that included a banquet lunch and a presentation by the CEO.
Benson remembers walking behind one of the executives leading the factory tour when they turned around and asked with complete sincerity, “Elon University? You must be owned by Elon Musk, is that correct?”
It was shocking to Benson that even a high-level executive would confuse this—and then be surprised when it wasn’t the case. She points to the business program’s overlap with the fact that Musk is a businessperson as a potential cause for the confusion. “When you go overseas, if people have never heard of the university, then, more than likely, they have heard of Elon Musk just because of his notoriety as an entrepreneur,” Benson said.
J.S. Nelson, a professor of law and a business ethics expert at Harvard University, likens Musk to previous versions of controversial or mesmerizing business figures such as Howard Hughes or William Randolph Hearst, the inspiration for the film "Citizen Kane." It makes sense that people are aware and interested in his antics, she says: Elon Musk has created a media image of himself as a controversial, savvy business titan, and ultimately has sucked “the oxygen from the room."
The current conflation of the names is unfortunate for the school, given its longstanding history, Nelson says. But she advises Elon students and alumni not to get too hung up on the Musk connection. Just as other infamous business figures have not cast an eternal shadow over people who happened to bear the same name, the Elon Musk association will eventually fade and the university will reclaim its identity.
It’s refreshing, in Nelson’s view, that the school can say “We are making the name Elon, which existed long before Elon Musk and will exist long afterward, mean something else.”
