News

Elon Musk is one of illegal immigration’s harshest critics. He once described his past immigration status as a ‘gray area’

September 29, 2024 5:12 AM

Published September 29, 2024 12:00 AM

By Catherine E. Shoichet, CNN

(CNN) — The world’s richest man stood steps away from the US-Mexico border, adjusting the brim of his black cowboy hat.

“As an immigrant to the United States, I am extremely pro-immigrant,” Elon Musk said, “and I believe that we need a greatly expanded legal immigration system, and that we should let anyone in the country who is hardworking and honest and will be a contributor to the United States.”

But in the September 2023 video from Eagle Pass, Texas, Musk said limits are needed, too.

“By the same token, we should also not be allowing people in the country if they’re breaking the law,” he said. “That doesn’t make sense. The law’s there for a reason.”

Since that border visit nearly a year ago, Musk’s critiques of illegal immigration have become a prominent part of his online presence. And he’s an increasingly powerful force shaping and amplifying conversations around the issue — especially since his 2022 takeover of Twitter, now known as X, and given his huge audience on the platform.

Immigration is a top topic on voters’ minds heading into the 2024 presidential election, and it was a major focal point of the August 12 conversation Musk hosted on X with former President Donald Trump.

The tech magnate’s more than 195 million followers on X frequently see him sharing posts endorsing conspiracy theories that claim the Biden administration has deliberately allowed undocumented immigrants to cross the border to gain political advantage. It’s also common to see posts referring to his own background as an immigrant and advocating for increased legal immigration to the US.

But it’s far less common to hear Musk talking about a chapter of his family’s immigration story that’s been described by his younger brother in several interviews — an anecdote that raises questions about the billionaire tech tycoon’s own immigration status when he was starting his first company in the United States.

Kimbal Musk: ‘We were illegal immigrants’

Elon Musk, 53, was born in Pretoria, South Africa, and moved to Canada shortly before his 18th birthday, acquiring citizenship there through his mother, a Canadian citizen. According to numerous biographies and profiles of him published in recent years, he had an enterprising spirit from a young age and his sights set on immigrating to the United States.

It’s been more than three decades since Musk came to the US in 1992 for his junior year as a transfer student at the University of Pennsylvania. Since then, he’s founded several high-profile Silicon Valley startups. And today he’s the CEO of Tesla Motors, the CEO of SpaceX and the chairman and chief technology officer of X. Forbes estimates his net worth at nearly $270 billion, placing him atop the magazine’s real-time billionaires list.

But his first company’s origins were humble.

He’s described its early days in numerous speeches and interviews — as has his younger brother, Kimbal Musk, a cofounder of the startup that set them both on a path to success in the United States.

In 1995, Musk moved to Palo Alto, California, where he planned to begin a Ph.D. program at Stanford. But shortly after the school year started, according to Walter Isaacson’s 2023 biography, Musk decided he’d rather capitalize on the emerging dotcom market and focus on founding a company with Kimbal.

During 2013 remarks at the Milken Institute Global Conference, an annual gathering of business executives and thought leaders, the brothers described details they’ve often shared about how they kept living expenses low by eating at Jack in the Box — and by living at their office.

“It was cheaper to rent the office than to rent an apartment. So we just rented the office, and slept in the office, and showered at the YMCA,” Elon Musk recalled, drawing laughs from the crowd.

At the 2013 event, the brothers also touched on a topic they’ve discussed less frequently in public: their immigration status during the company’s founding.

In early 1996, their startup, an early online city guide and mapping tool, got a $3 million infusion from venture capitalists. The investors soon found themselves surprised, according to Kimbal Musk’s account captured in a video of the 2013 event posted on the Milken Institute’s YouTube page.

“When they did fund us,” Kimbal Musk recalled, “they realized that we were illegal immigrants.”

“Well…” Elon Musk interjected.

“Yes, we were,” Kimbal Musk pushed back.

Video of the remarks shows Elon Musk laughing as he jumped in with a different interpretation: “I’d say it was a gray area.”

He didn’t elaborate, and it’s unclear what Elon Musk meant by that characterization. The Musk brothers haven’t responded to CNN’s requests for comment on the exchange, nor to reports earlier this year quoting it on the tech website Gizmodo and in The Los Angeles Times.

Other accounts they’ve shared in public, and descriptions in biographies of the billionaire entrepreneur, don’t specify what kind of visas they had when founding the company or at later points — key details that would reveal what requirements they would have needed to meet to maintain a legal status in the US.

Two biographies of Musk, Isaacson’s eponymous tome and Ashlee Vance’s 2015 “Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX and the Quest for a Fantastic Future,” state that investors in the startup went on to help both brothers obtain visas.

It’s unclear what kind of visa Elon Musk had when the brothers and their friend Greg Kouri started the company eventually dubbed Zip2, and what path he went on to take to become a legal resident and citizen of the United States.

How experts interpret Elon Musk’s ‘gray area’ description

According to Isaacson’s biography and an Esquire magazine profile of Musk, he became a US citizen in 2002 — 10 years after he arrived in the country — in a ceremony at the Los Angeles County fairgrounds.

But exactly what steps he took to reach that point after his years as a student are unclear.

In response to questions from CNN, US Citizenship and Immigration Services says the agency can’t “share, confirm, or deny immigration information about specific individuals” due to privacy considerations.

Elon Musk has not responded to CNN’s questions about his immigration journey, but he’s referenced it in multiple online posts.

In response to details his mother, Maye Musk, has shared on X about her own immigration journey, Elon Musk has called legal immigration to the US “a laborious Kafkaesque nightmare” and noted that becoming a US citizen “was extremely difficult and took over a decade.”

But why did he describe his prior immigration status as a “gray area” back in 2013?

A 2016 Snopes article found “little evidence that he was ever in the U.S. without documentation,” citing previous articles about the tech tycoon and a 2007 PBS interview where he described himself as a legal immigrant.

But immigration experts who spoke with CNN said the way Elon Musk responded when the issue was brought up publicly in 2013 suggests another possibility.

“Actually, there are no gray areas in immigration,” says Charles Kuck, an Atlanta immigration attorney. Instead, Kuck says, there are people who get caught for violations, and people who don’t.

Jennifer Minear, an immigration attorney who focuses on employment issues, points out that given that Musk is now a US citizen, “obviously he did something to regularize his status.”

“But that doesn’t mean that there wasn’t a period of time that he was without (legal) status. … It sounds like there was a little bit of wonkiness in his past with immigration,” says Minear, a past president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association.

That’s not uncommon, Kuck says.

“Our immigration laws are so strict that, regardless of how perfect you try to be, many people would find themselves in this same gray area, in the context of, you probably did something that would make you deportable at some point during your immigration journey,” he says.

That assessment, he says, is based on the law at the time and the law today.

“I will tell you, as somebody who’s done immigration law for 35 years, that a lot of immigrants leave their immigration history behind, right? They want to move on to their new life,” Kuck says. “But when you speak out against other people’s immigration journey, then yours becomes subject to scrutiny. … If you live in a glass house, you shouldn’t throw stones.”

Student visas come with strict requirements about work

The 2013 Milken Institute event isn’t the only time the brothers’ early immigration status in the US has come up.

“America forces you to be illegal if you want to start a company as an immigrant. I know. That’s how I did it,” Kimbal Musk wrote on Twitter, now X, in 2017.

In addition to that post, the younger Musk, who’s now a SpaceX and Tesla board member and also an entrepreneur behind a number of restaurants and food-related ventures, also brought up the issue during a 2020 appearance on Third Row Tesla, a podcast created by fans of the electric vehicle company.

In the interview, Kimbal Musk again recalled the early days of their startup.

“I don’t know if you were, but I was not legally in America. So I was illegally there,” he said, looking across the table at his brother.

“I was legally there,” Elon Musk responded, “but I was meant to be doing student work.”

A few moments later, describing early conversations with the venture capitalists who helped fund Zip2, Kimbal Musk reiterated details he’d shared in his 2013 remarks: “We had to break the news to them that … we don’t have a car, and we don’t have an apartment, and we are illegal.”

This time, Elon Musk denied the description applied to him.

“You’re illegal,” he said, eliciting laughs from the Tesla fans sitting beside him. “I was legal, but my visa was going to run out in two years.”

During the interview, Elon Musk said that at the time he had a “student work visa.” He also noted that he had decided to defer his Stanford enrollment that year “a couple days into the semester.”

The Musk brothers haven’t responded to CNN’s requests for comment on this exchange either.

Experts who spoke with CNN say these descriptions of what occurred also raise questions about what kind of work authorization Elon Musk had and which institution helped him get it. The description “student work visa” could be referring to various programs, they said, but it’s not an official term. Student visas are generally strict about how much off-campus work is permitted, and that work authorization is directly tied to the academic institution where a student is enrolled.

The complexities are something today’s international students, and the administrators who advise them, follow closely, according to Hunter Swanson, associate director of the Center for International Education at Washington and Lee University in Virginia.

A work permit for optional practical training connected to a student’s areas of academic focus can be granted after graduation, or possibly before graduation if the student is maintaining a full course of study. It’s also possible during an academic program to get permission to work for course credit. Grace periods after graduation allow someone to stay in the United States for a period of time, but no work is allowed in that window.

A foreign student failing to follow these rules today runs the risk of jeopardizing their future in the United States, Swanson says.

“Most international students are very conscientious. They ask people in my position a lot of questions before they do things like accept a job…or even an unpaid internship,” he says. “They’re scared to death of losing their visa status.”

Swanson, who also helps with training as an e-learning dean for an association that represents international educators, says it’s likely regulations weren’t enforced as strictly during Elon Musk’s time as a student. Enforcement of student visa restrictions, and the systems officials use to monitor compliance, intensified dramatically after the September 11 terror attacks, Swanson says. That was years after Elon Musk’s college graduation.

Without more information about what visas and work authorization he had — and when he had them — it’s impossible to draw conclusions about Elon Musk’s immigration journey, Swanson says. “It’s very unclear.”

“It does raise questions,” Swanson says, “but it doesn’t mean what he did wasn’t legal.”

Minear, the former American Immigration Lawyers Association president, also says it’s impossible to know Elon Musk’s immigration path without access to the paper trail in his government file. It’s possible he followed the requirements of his student visa, or that he was granted an exception allowing him to work.

Which institution was connected to his student visa, and when, are key details we don’t know, she said.

If his student visa was tied to a graduate program at Stanford, Minear said, he would have to be actively studying there to remain in status.

And if his work authorization was a form of optional practical training tied to his undergraduate studies at Penn, Minear says that typically would have required him to have graduated — something that Vance’s biography indicates Elon Musk did not do until 1997, well after Zip2 had been established. It would also require Musk to work in a field connected with his degrees, according to Minear.

University of Pennsylvania spokesman Ron Ozio confirmed to CNN that Musk officially graduated in 1997 with degrees in economics and physics.

In Vance’s biography, Musk is quoted stating he didn’t graduate in 1995 due to English and History coursework requirements he hadn’t completed. His degrees, he told Vance, were ultimately granted in 1997 because the requirements had changed.

Asked about reports that Musk deferred his Stanford enrollment days into the fall 1995 semester or dropped out of the school, an official at the university told CNN there’s no record he ever enrolled.

“We can confirm that Mr. Musk applied and was accepted to Stanford’s Materials Science and Engineering graduate program,” Stanford Engineering Associate Dean of Communications and Alumni Affairs Julie Greicius wrote in an email, “but we don’t have any record of him enrolling.”

‘What if Elon Musk had to go through the regular channel?’

Looking at the bigger picture, experts who spoke with CNN also noted that Elon Musk’s story is a telling example of the value immigrants bring to the country.

“The fact that he had any difficulty at all in getting to where he is because of immigration barriers, or (the possibility) that he was out of status at any time and unable to pursue his entrepreneurial goals…is a poor reflection on our current system and speaks to the need for it to be updated and changed,” Minear says.

It’s common for foreign students who dream of becoming entrepreneurs to face immigration hurdles, according to Rajshree Agarwal, director of the Ed Snider Center for Enterprise and Markets at the University of Maryland. Many are forced to pursue paths that require them to continue their studies or work in a lower-level position rather than striking out early on their own, she says.

Musk’s investors reportedly helping him obtain a visa “made him unconstrained from immigration much earlier than is the norm,” Agarwal says. His swift success shows how valuable such support can be, she says, and raises questions about what might have happened if he hadn’t gotten it.

Agarwal says based on her research and observations during her 30-year career as a professor, it’s typical for foreign students to face delays of up to 10 years between when they graduate and when they get a green card, the legal step that allows them to start a new venture. Exactly how much time the process can take varies depending on factors like caps on the number of visas issued and country of origin, she says.

“What if Elon Musk had to go through the regular channel and wait the average of 8 to 10 years … as opposed to being a founder that’s able to make decisions and get right to stakeholders already? Zip2 would not have been created. … What would have been the loss to this country?” she says.

Or, Agarwal asks, what would have happened if Musk had been deported or forced to return to Canada or South Africa?

He wasn’t, and in 1999, Compaq purchased Zip2 for more than $300 million in cash — a deal that provided Elon Musk with more than $20 million and a launch pad for his next entrepreneurial venture. Later that year, he became a cofounder of the online banking system that eventually became PayPal.

How Elon Musk’s views on immigration are shaping the conversation

His business successes since then are well documented — as are his increasingly pointed opinions about immigration.

A CNN analysis of Elon Musk’s posts on X found a marked increase in the number and frequency of his immigration-related posts starting around the time of his border visit last year. This year alone, he’s authored at least 150 immigration-related posts.

That tally, based on a search of immigration-related terms, doesn’t reflect times when Musk has simply shared others’ immigration-related posts or responded to them without directly mentioning words related to the topic — a common approach for Musk, according to Mert Can Bayar, a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Washington who studies conspiracy theories and misinformation.

Immigration-related posts from Musk in the past month include a question about whether Arizona is refusing to remove undocumented voters from its rolls, a message slamming unchecked illegal immigration as “civilizational suicide” and multiple posts arguing Democrats are deliberately importing migrants and pushing to legalize their status in order to secure political control.

It’s illegal for anyone who’s not a US citizen to vote in a federal election, and experts say voting by non-citizens is extremely rare, according to decades of voting data and nonpartisan analyses.

But that hasn’t stopped Musk from focusing on the issue. And his posts have a particularly wide reach, Bayar says.

“He’s the most followed account on X. Every post he does gets millions of views. … When he points out something, it’s a disproportionate number of views, and a disproportionate amount of attention,” says Bayar, who’s traced Elon Musk’s role in spreading a resurgent rumor and a misleading video about non-citizens voting in US elections.

Zachary Mueller, senior research director for the immigrant advocacy organization America’s Voice, says Musk’s posts frequently echo the “great replacement theory,” which argues that elites are intentionally facilitating an invasion of non-White migrants to replace the power of White people.

“He’s amplifying it to a new level, and he becomes part of the problem,” Mueller says.

Musk has denied that he’s pushing the racist theory with his posts.

“I don’t subscribe to that. I’m simply saying there is an incentive here. … The more that come into the country, the more they’re likely to vote in that direction. It is, in my view, a simple incentive to increase Democratic voters,” he told Don Lemon earlier this year after the former CNN anchor pointed out that only US citizens can vote in federal elections.

But Mueller says there’s a dehumanizing and racist undertone to many of Musk’s immigration-related posts that shouldn’t be overlooked.

He called Musk’s recent remarks during a live conversation on X with Trump “quite disgustingly notable,” pointing out that Musk compared migrants at the border to a “World War Z zombie apocalypse.”

While some have downplayed the significance of Musk’s intensified focus on immigration, the entrepreneur’s frequent posts about the issue have caught the attention of policy experts like David Bier, director of immigration studies at the libertarian CATO Institute.

When Musk shared a post earlier this year stating that Democrats would not deport migrants because “every illegal is a highly likely vote at some point,” Bier responded with links to numerous articles refuting the claim. “This couldn’t be more wrong,” he wrote, pointing out not only the federal law establishing that only US citizens can vote in federal elections, but that most naturalized citizens don’t vote and that most formerly undocumented immigrants who received amnesty in the 1980s didn’t become citizens for decades, even though they were eligible.

Bier told CNN he felt like he had to chime in. Musk’s inaccurate political framing of the issue, he argues, overlooks the clear reality that economic forces are driving most migration.

“You can’t just totally ignore what he’s saying, because so many people are going to see everything he says,” Bier says. “And he’s a world-renowned entrepreneur. He does have some more clout, I think, than just a politician, who people are kind of more skeptical of.”

Beyond social media, there are signs Musk’s views on immigration and other issues are becoming more influential in the halls of power, too.

Trump has said that if he’s reelected, Musk could play a role in his next administration, as an advisor or in a Cabinet position helping improve government efficiency.

Rep. Joe Wilson, R-South Carolina, cited Musk in March remarks on the House floor.

“Yesterday Elon Musk shocked America,” Wilson began. He went on to quote one of Musk’s posts on X, which warned “it is highly probable that the groundwork is being laid for something far worse than 9/11. Just a matter of time.” The post included a link to an article describing flights of migrants into the US. Neither the article nor Musk’s post mentioned the flights were part of a government program that aims to create more pathways for migrants to enter the US legally and reduce pressure at the border.