Elon Musk briefly worked illegally in the United States after abandoning a graduate program in California, the Washington Post reported, contrasting the episode with the South African billionaire’s anti-immigrant views. .
In recent weeks, the Tesla and SpaceX boss has endorsed Donald Trump’s second presidential campaign while touting the Republican White House candidate’s opposition to “open borders” on his X social media site. , who had previously claimed to be a student-turned-entrepreneur, was a “legal gray area”.
However, the Washington Post reported on Saturday that the world’s richest man had no legitimate business for a period in 1995 after dropping out of Stanford University to work for his debut company, Zip2, which sold for about $300 million in four years. It is almost certain that he was working in the United States without permission. later.
Legal experts said foreign students cannot drop out of school and start a company even if they are not paid a salary. The newspaper also pointed out that student visa regulations were more lax before the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States.
Leon Fresco, a former U.S. Department of Justice immigration litigator, said, “If you do things that promote revenue generation, like design code or try to sell to promote revenue generation, you’re going to have problems.” I will do it,” he told the media.
However, the paper also acknowledged that “overstays on student visas are somewhat common and authorities sometimes turn a blind eye to them, but they remain illegal.”
Musk previously said, “I was there legally, but I was going to do some student work. I got to do some kind of work that would support anything.”
Musk employs 121,000 people at Tesla, about 13,000 at SpaceX, and about 3,000 at Company X. The scrutiny of Mr. Musk’s immigration status, after dropping out of Stanford University, comes as President Trump has touted his desire for Mr. Musk to serve in a high-profile role focused on efficiency in government. If voters in the Nov. 5 election restore Kamala Harris to the presidency at the expense of Kamala Harris, a second Trump administration will be inaugurated.
Musk, in turn, accused the vice president and his fellow Democrats of “importing voters” through illegal and temporary protected status immigration. During a recent Trump campaign appearance, he likened the U.S.-Mexico border to a “zombie apocalypse,” and previously described himself as “very pro-immigrant, myself included.”
Bloomberg News recently released an analysis of more than 53,000 posts sent from Musk’s X account, showing that the entrepreneur’s output has become increasingly political in this election year. It turns out.
“Immigration and voter fraud became Musk’s most frequent post addressing policy themes in 2024, garnering approximately 10 billion views,” the outlet said. “Musk has posted more than 1,300 times overall on this topic, with over 330 posts in the past two months alone.”
Bloomberg described Musk (who paid $44 billion for X in 2022 and then Twitter) as the platform’s single most important influencer, ordering site engineers to push his posts to users’ feeds. It is reported that. That makes Musk “the most widely read person on the site today,” Bloomberg said.
