Evidence is growing that Elon Musk was an illegal immigrant before he decided he hated immigrants

The hypocrisy is astonishing.

Cover blown

Elon Musk has done so fervently protested against immigration for years. But it turns out that when he first started out as an entrepreneur in the United States, the South African-born billionaire was staying and working there illegally. The Washington Post reportswith his employees even fearing that he could be deported from the country.

While his brother Kimbal did admitted that they were both working illegallyThis contradicts what Musk has stated in the past about his legal status – and is blatantly hypocritical for someone who promotes anti-immigration rhetoric and conspiracy theories as he supports the Republican candidate Donald Trump as president.

Musk arrived in Palo Alto, California in 1995 to pursue a graduate degree program at Stanford University. But he never enrolled in any courses, instead working on his startup that would become Zip2, which sold for $300 million in 1999. It’s safe to say that Musk wouldn’t be the wealthy tycoon he is today without that golden ticket.

But while Musk was doing his first business, he was in the U.S. illegally, according to legal experts who spoke WaPo. Because he never went to school, he was not allowed to stay in the country, let alone work there.

“If you do anything that helps facilitate monetization, like design code or try to make sales to facilitate monetization, then you’re in trouble,” Leon Fresco, a former Justice Department immigration attorney, told me. WaPo.

Rules for you

Musk’s questionable legal status was a major concern for investors backing Zip2, which aimed to become a publicly traded company or merge with an existing company. A financing agreement from a venture capital firm that invested in the company stated that Musk and his brother Kimbal had 45 days to obtain legal work status, WaPo found.

“Their immigration status was not what it should be in order to legally operate a business in the US,” said Derek Proudian, a former Zip2 board member and later CEO. WaPo. “We do not want our founder to be deported.”

According to former employees and shareholders, Musk said he was in the country on a student visa – which does not allow work. Because he never enrolled at Stanford, he could not stay in the US with that visa.

Although Musk denies this today and claiming he had a “student work visa,” he appeared to admit his questionable immigration status in a 2005 email to Tesla’s co-founders explaining his decision to enroll at Stanford.

“I didn’t really care about the degree, but I had no money for a lab and no legal right to stay in the country, so that seemed like a good way to solve both problems,” Musk wrote in the email. , revealed in a California defamation case, per WaPo.

That in itself is not scandalous: working or staying in the country outside the limits of a student visa is a common and often necessary way for foreign students to temporarily support themselves. But it’s remarkably two-faced for Musk to vilify immigrants and demand stricter border policies while benefiting from a more relaxed immigration system.

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