The Holes in Elon Musk's Immigration Story
When did Elon Musk get his green card?
There are a lot of holes in Elon Musk's immigration status that raise the question of whether he committed immigration fraud. Biden has said Musk was an illegal worker, but Musk has pushed back on that characterization.
There are three visa types in question, there's the F-1 he would have been on at Penn. And then Musk claimed in October that his J-1 “transitioned” to an H-1B. At some point this must have led to a green card, prior to his being granted citizenship in 2002.
He was in a lot of grey areas in the 1990s, there's the weird detail about his degree from Penn not being issued until 1997.
The Post has suggested that he lost authorization to be in the country in 1995 when he declined to enroll at Stanford, and instead started work on Zip2. This is probably illegal because he's founding his own company and an H-1B is tied to an employer. Wired has reported that he received work authorization in 1997.
When Zip2 was acquired in 1999, they would have become the sponsoring company for his H-1B. The problem is Musk isn’t working there, and Compaq then ceased to exist in 2002, the year Musk acquired citizenship.
What’s really strange about this is, he gets his exit in February 1999, and then a month later founds X[dot]com, which becomes federally insured. So a federal agency grants this very substantial backing to an H-1B recipient who’s not actually working at the company sponsoring him.
Musk is ousted from X/Confinity by the board in 2000 and shortly thereafter it becomes PayPal. So Musk isn't working at the company, he's just a shareholder, when he acquires citizenship.
He receives U.S. citizenship just before the PayPal IPO in 2002.
The reason why these timelines are important is you need to have a green card for five years before becoming a citizen. There are five years between Wired’s account of his work authorization and his reported naturalization.
Let’s assume for a moment no malfeasance at all. There’s this bright young guy who wants to found a new company (which suspiciously would undercut the revenues of news publishers), someone allows a slight fudging of the rules so he can more or less sponsor his own H-1B visa as the cofounder of Zip2. H-1B visas are good for three years, and can be extended for three more.
Esquire reported Musk “took the oath of American citizenship with thirty-five hundred other immigrants at the Pomona Fairplex” in 2002.
The question hinges on when Musk received his green card. If Wired and the Post are correct, and he didn’t receive work authorization until 1997, even assuming he immediately started the green card process, there’s simply no way he could have had five years on the books to be granted citizenship in 2002.
If his J-1 visa “transitioned” to an H-1B, there’s no automatic mechanism to do that, so the question is who fixed it for him. What government department wrote the letter saying his work was important, and when did it happen? He doesn’t seem to have had a job lined up, so even if Musk is telling the truth, he’s being granted an H-1B visa on a very unusual basis. And this special treatment is being extended so Musk can work on a start-up that makes… city guides? Hardly the forefront of innovation.
His naturalization papers would be a matter of public record, and as far as I know, nobody has published them. If he was naturalized in Pomona—right next to Claremont—they would probably be in the National Archives branch in Riverside. But another weird thing about this is his companies are all based in the Bay Area, but he’s taking the oath of citizenship in Southern California.
Without suggesting fraud, there’s clearly fudging and fast-tracking going on. One question would be, should a person who had no work authorization have to go home before being granted it? A basic question relevant to many immigration cases. A more serious one would be whether a person can be denaturalized if they were fast-tracked in ways that skirted the law.
This is very salient because Canadian authorities view X to be in violation of a number of their laws. He could try to claim asylum in order to avoid being deported, but Canada is not exactly known as a repressive country.