Elon Musk was an illegal migrant worker who abused his student visa

Elon Musk was working illegally on a student visa and faced fears he would be “deported” when he started life in the United States, a bombshell report revealed Saturday.

The South African-born immigrant billionaire also admitted in an email that he “didn’t have the legal right to stay in the country” when he dropped out of school and founded a company he later sold for more than 300 million dollars. The Washington Post reported. His brother was also here illegally, committing what one expert called “entry fraud.”

The revelation comes after Musk, Tesla, X, SpaceX and Starlink’s CEO went all-in to support Donald Trump and repeatedly accused Democrats of trying to flood the country with immigrants crossing the border illegally, a conspiracy theory that has become mainstream in the Republican party. Bloomberg called it “the biggest promotion of X’s anti-immigrant conspiracies”.

His ally is Trump advocating mass deportation of millions of undocumented migrants. The former president also raved about “chain migration.”

But Of the Post detailed reports about Musk’s own immigration journey show that the world’s richest man abused his student visa to found his first company, Global Link Information Network, which became Zip2. The investors were so concerned that he might be “deported” that they sought the advice of an immigration attorney.

Musk was born in South Africa and, aged 18, obtained Canadian citizenship through his Canadian-born mother, Maye. He first studied in Canada, then transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, which gave him a student visa.

In 1995 he moved to Palo Alto where he had a place at Stanford University, which would have given him another student visa. Student visas give holders the right to work part-time to support their studies.

But The post revealed that Musk did not enroll at all, which would have invalidated his student visa. Instead, he worked on his start-up. Giving up education to work, even if technically unpaid, is simply illegal, said Leon Fresco, a former immigration attorney at the Justice Department.

“If you’re doing something that helps facilitate revenue generation, like design code, or you’re trying to make sales to promote revenue generation, then you’re in trouble,” Fresco said.

Musk said he recruited his brother to help run the company. But Kimbal said he actively lied to border agents, having previously been denied entry at an airport on the grounds that he was working illegally in the US when he tried to return from visiting their mother in Canada. He had a friend drive him across the border and lied that they were going to see the David Letterman show so he could do what he described in an interview with journalist Graham Bensinger as a critical meeting with investors.

“This is entry fraud,” said Ira Kurzban, former president and general counsel of the American Immigration Lawyers. The post. “That would make him inadmissible and permanently banned from the United States,” he said, unless the sanctions were waived. Additionally, hiring someone without the legal right to work in the US is a federal crime.

The Musk family’s illegal status worried one investor, Mohr Davidow Ventures, so much that when it invested $3 million in the company in 1996, the agreement included a clause giving the brothers and a third party 45 days to obtain legal status.

Said Derek Proudian, who served on Zip2’s board and later became CEO The post The investor sentiment was, “We don’t want our founder to be deported.” He added: “Their immigration status was not what it should be for them to be legally employed to run a company in the US.”

Another investor told the newspaper anonymously: “Perhaps naively we never looked into whether he was a legal citizen.”

The Post reported that the lawyer used by the company told both men not to tell the whole truth about their “management” roles and to purge their resumes of American addresses.

Zip2 was sold to Compaq in 1999 for $305 million, with Musk bringing in $22 million. The company set him on a path that led to him becoming CEO of PayPal, which in turn led to his involvement in Tesla and the founding of SpaceX. He is currently worth $274 billion, conformable Forbes. He became a US citizen in 2002. Making false statements about past immigration status on a citizenship application is illegal and can be grounds for revocation. It is not known whether Musk made false statements.

In a 2005 email to Tesla’s co-founders that was filed in a California court, Musk wrote about going to Stanford: “I didn’t really care much about the degree, but I didn’t have the money for a lab and not the legal right to stay in the country, so it seemed like a good way to solve both problems.”

In 2013, the Musk brothers appeared on a panel at the Miliken Institute conference, where Kimball said they were “illegal immigrants,” and Musk jumped in to say it was “a gray area.”

Beast has reached out to Musk’s lawyer, Alex Spiro, for comment. The post said that he, Musk and the manager of Musk’s family office did not respond to their request for comment.