The 125-year-old government school in South Africa attended by the richest person in the world

Pretoria Boys High School has produced many notable alumni over its 125-year history, including the world’s wealthiest person, Elon Musk.

The school, colloquially known as Boys High, is situated in the Brooklyn suburb of South Africa’s capital, Pretoria, southeast of the city centre.

More than 1,500 pupils are enrolled at the school, including 300 boarders, making it the largest boys’ school in South Africa.

Pretoria Boys traces its history back to the Afrikaans Staatsmodelskool, which was built in the 1880s by the government of the South African Republic.

Following the British capture of Pretoria in 1900 during the Second Anglo-Boer War, the building was repurposed as a school for English-speaking pupils.

This new school opened its doors on 3 June 1901, with Charles Hope as headmaster. Hope would leave the position just 15 months later, and the school would be renamed to Pretoria College in 1905.

Initially a co-educational school, the girl pupils would leave at the same time as Hope to form Pretoria Boys’ sister school, the Pretoria High School for Girls.

Wanting to establish a permanent campus, Alfred Milner, 1st Viscount Milner, set aside 200 hectares of land southeast of Pretoria, which would become the current site of Pretoria Boys.

The new campus was officially opened in 1909 by General Jan Smuts and was renamed to Pretoria High School for Boys following a merger with the Afrikaans Eendracht Hoërskool.

During the 1920s, however, the divide between English and Afrikaans students led to the formation of the separate Afrikaans Hoër Seunskool across the railway line from Pretoria Boys.

By the end of Apartheid in the 1990s, Pretoria Boys High School had grown to over 1,500 pupils and 100 full-time staff, and its facilities had been greatly expanded.

This included the addition of three new sports fields, a rugby pavilion, a central dining hall, and an artificial hockey field, as well as the introduction of four new day houses to the school.

Pretoria Boys’ most famous students

Many notable alumni of Pretoria Boys High School include at least two Nobel Prize winners.

Max Theiler, who attended the school during the 1910s, received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1951 for developing the yellow fever vaccine.

South African-born biophysicist Michael Levitt, who received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2013, attended the school for two years between 1960 and 1962.

The school has also produced four Springbok rugby players, including John Smit, who captained the team to winning the 2007 Rugby World Cup in France.

The most notable former student of Pretoria Boys High, however, is the South African-born businessman Elon Musk, who first moved to the school in 1987 during his Grade 10 year.

Musk’s performance at the school was reported to be decent but unexceptional, earning 61/100 for Afrikaans and getting a B on his senior maths certification.

He matriculated from the school in 1989, shortly before moving to Canada to avoid mandatory military service for the Apartheid government.

After emigrating, Musk founded web software company Zip2 in 1995 and earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania just two years later.

When Zip2 was sold in 1999, Musk co-founded e-commerce payment platform X.com, which would merge with Confinity in March 2000 to become PayPal.

In 2002, PayPal was acquired by e-commerce giant eBay. At the same time, Musk co-founded and became CEO and chief engineer of space technology company SpaceX.

Musk also became an early investor in the automotive and energy company Tesla in 2004, and by 2008 had been appointed as its CEO and product architect.

He co-founded the AI company OpenAI in 2015 but left shortly after, and acquired the social networking platform Twitter in 2022, rebranding it as X.

Musk became the first ever US-dollar trillionaire in June 2026 following the initial public offering of SpaceX, which became the largest IPO in history at $1.77 trillion.

While Musk’s net worth has dropped to just over $700 billion since then, he is still ranked as the wealthiest person in the world by Forbes.

---

Pretoria Boys High School photos

---