Elon Musk, the billionaire founder of Space X and Tesla, and the world’s richest man, is convinced that immigrants who have lived and worked in the United States without legal authorization are destabilizing American democracy. It sounds like another conspiracy theory from a man who spouts a lot of them. But on Saturday, the Washington Post reported on one such figure, hiding in plain sight:
Long before he became one of Donald Trump’s biggest donors and campaign surrogates, South African-born Elon Musk worked illegally in the United States as he launched his entrepreneurial career after ditching a graduate studies program in California, according to former business associates, court records and company documents obtained by the Washington Post.
As the Post story laid out, Musk was working for his first company, an online business and city directory called Zip2, while living in the United States, officially, as a student. But he never actually took classes at Stanford University—a precondition for staying in the US. A former board member, Derek Proudian, supplied the story’s money quote. The mindset within the company at the time, he told the paper, was “we don’t want our founder being deported.”
The mindset within the company at the time, he told the paper, was “we don’t want our founder being deported.”
Musk has been cagey about his immigration status during his first years as an entrepreneur, but as the story makes clear, his brother, Kimbal, has often made light of it, describing himself and his very famous sibling in public forums as “illegal immigrants.”
It’s tempting to call this a big bunch of hypocrisy. Musk has, after all, spent more than $100 million to elect a candidate who promises the mass deportation of immigrants who have overstayed their visas. But I think that overlooks both what’s driving his demands for immigration restrictions and misreads his vision for the world. Musk does not really have a problem with South African computer programmers skirting the rules. He, like Trump and his running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, has a problem with the specific kinds of migrants coming from specific kinds of places. In a 2023 response to an antisemitic X user who claimed that Western Jews deserved no sympathy because they invited “hordes of minorities” to their countries, Musk wrote, “You have said the absolute truth.”
What makes migrants undesirable, to the people demanding these crackdowns, is not their status but who they are and why they’re here. It’s why Vance can say that Haitians with legal status are “illegals” anyway. As a proponent of scientific racism, Musk believes migrants from the Global South are being imported as part of a massive plot to reshape the country’s demography and elect Democrats forever. This is delusional in so many different ways—not the least of which is its ignorance of the long-term voting patterns of immigrant groups themselves—but it is not hypocritical any more than it is hypocritical to embrace restrictions on speech in support of Palestinians and Turkish dissidents but to reject restrictions on the speech of right-wing Brazilians. The animating principle is not supposed to be consistent and objective. His position merely reflects the animus and preference of a red-pilled bigot. What does the oligarch want? He wants what he wants.
