Elon Musk, owner of SpaceXTesla and
The revelation is relevant as Musk has become one of the largest donors and supporters of former Republican president and current candidate Donald Trump, supporting his rhetoric against irregular immigration.
In recent months, Musk has amplified false theories of Trump on undocumented migrants, accusing them of destroying the country and spreading those opinions among his more than 200 million followers on X, a platform that he acquired in 2022 and renamed to X, instead of Twitter.
According to the Washington Post, Musk did not have the legal right to work while building Zip2the company he sold for about $300 million in 1999, and which was his springboard to Tesla and other companies that have made him the richest person in the world.
Musk came to Palo Alto in 1995 to pursue a graduate program at Stanford University, but never enrolled, dedicating himself instead to his business ventures.
This, according to legal experts consulted by the Post, left him without a legal basis to remain in the country, since by not enrolling in college, he would have had to leave the United States under the immigration laws of the time. In any case, he would not have been allowed to work.
As Leon Fresco, a former Department of Justice lawyer, told The Washington Post, foreign students who arrive in the United States with a student visa cannot abandon their studies to found a company, even if they are not receiving immediate payments at that time.
Musk has never publicly acknowledged working without legal status. In a 2013 interview, he joked that he was in a “gray zone” early in his career, and in 2020, he said he had a “student work visa” after leaving Stanford.
“I was legally there, but I was supposed to do study-related work,” Musk stated in a podcast in 2020.
Neither Musk, his lawyer Alex Spiro, nor the head of Musk’s family office responded to requests from The Washington Post for a response to these revelations.
