Elon Musk worked in the US illegally, which contradicts the anti-immigrant position

Elon Musk, now a key supporter of Donald Trump, once worked in the U.S. without legal status, according to former associates, court records and company documents reviewed The Washington Post.

Despite the entrepreneur’s vocal stance against undocumented immigration, Musk did not have a work permit when he founded Zip2 in 1995.

Musk and his brother Kimbal originally came to the US on student visas, but Elon was never accepted into his Stanford program. Legal experts said that refusing to study would have meant that he would have lost the right to work. “If you’re doing something that’s for profit, you’re in trouble,” said Leon Fresco, a former immigration attorney at the Justice Department.

Investors Mohr Davidow Ventures, which funded Zip2, required the brothers to provide legal work status. “Their immigration status was not what it needed to be in order to legally operate a company in the U.S.,” said Derek Prudian, a former Zip2 board member.

In a 2020 podcast, Musk described his employment status as a “gray area” and denied that he was working illegally. However, Kimbal Musk has repeatedly acknowledged the brothers’ unauthorized status, calling their experience proof of a dysfunctional immigration system.

The revelations of Musk’s early immigration problems come as he ramps up his “open borders” claims and rails against undocumented immigrants on X, the social media platform he owns.

Read more at The Washington Post.