Trump ally Elon Musk was an ‘illegal worker’ when he started his American career

President Joe Biden shouted Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, now a Republican megadonor and Trump campaign surrogate, for hypocrisy on immigration on Saturday, saying Musk started his long career in the US as an “illegal worker” before becoming the world’s richest man.

The president made the comments during a campaign event in support of Democrats that took place Saturday in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Biden labeled Musk as former President Donald Trump’s wealthy new “ally,” saying, “That richest man in the world turned out to be an illegal worker here when he was here,” referring to Musk.

‘He should have been in school when he got a student visa. He wasn’t in school. He broke the law. He’s talking about all these ‘illegals’ coming our way,” Biden added.

He then criticized Trump and Republicans for failing to sign legislation that would solve “the border problem.” He added: “We now have fewer people crossing the border illegally – or crossing the border – than at any time since his third year as president of the United States.”

The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment on Biden’s comments.

Musk recently completed a series of “town hall” events in the same swing state of Pennsylvania, where he tried to convince voters to support Trump and Trump’s policies. Musk also stoked his fan base there by handing out $1 million prizes to registered voters in swing states who signed a petition circulated by his pro-Trump group, America PAC.

According to an analysis by the Peterson Institute for International Economics, Trump’s new immigration policy proposals include plans for the largest deportation operation in US history, ending birthright citizenship and revoking the visas of and deporting foreign students who are pro-Palestinian are demonstrators. .

Biden’s comments about Musk, his Trump alliance and immigration hypocrisy followed a Washington Post report citing correspondence, legal documents and multiple people who helped Musk get a work visa in 1996 after he had already gone without one worked.

Musk had arrived in the US and moved to California with the stated intention of attending graduate school at Stanford in the mid-1990s. He didn’t enroll in the program he said he was accepted into and instead started building a venture-backed startup called Zip2 with his brother.

The Washington Post wrote that investors in Musk’s first company were concerned about their “founder being deported” and gave him a deadline to obtain a work visa.

Zip2 sold for approx $300 million in 1999, a windfall that enabled Elon Musk to later become an early investor and chairman of Tesla, and to found his capital-intensive aerospace company SpaceX, which is now a major U.S. defense contractor.

These companies have made Musk the richest person in the world on paper. According to Forbes, the Tesla CEO’s net worth currently stands at approximately $274 billion.

In late 2022, Musk used that considerable wealth to acquire social network Twitter in a $44 billion buyout.

On the platform, since renaming it

He has also shared the false claim that non-citizens systematically vote in U.S. elections, a conspiracy theory by conservative groups to provide the legal basis to challenge the election results if the Democratic candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris, wins the presidency.

In the US, it is already a federal crime and under the laws of every state for non-citizens to register or vote in federal elections.

According to research from the Brennan Center for Justice, “extensive research shows that fraud is very rare, voter impersonation is virtually non-existent, and many cases of alleged fraud are in fact errors by voters or administrators. The same applies to mail. ballots, which are secure and essential to conducting safe elections amid the coronavirus pandemic.”

— CNBC’s Rebecca Picciotto contributed to this report.