Elon Musk was an illegal migrant worker who abused his student visa when he founded his company

Elon Musk was working illegally on a student visa and had concerns he would be “deported” when he began life in the United States, a bombshell report revealed on Saturday.

The billionaire South African-born immigrant also admitted in an email that he “had no legal right to remain in the country” when he dropped out of college and started a company he later sold for more than $300 million. dollars sold. The Washington Post reported. His brother was also here illegally and committed what one expert described as “entry fraud.”

The revelation came after Musk, the CEO of Tesla, left the Republican Party. Bloomberg called him “X’s biggest proponent of anti-immigrant conspiracies.”

His ally Trump supports the mass deportation of millions of illegal migrants. The former president also railed against “chain migration.”

But that Posts Detailed reporting on Musk's own immigration journey reveals that the world's richest man abused his student visa to start his first company, Global Link Information Network, which became Zip2. Investors were so concerned that he would be “deported” that they sought advice from an immigration lawyer.

Musk was born in South Africa and received Canadian citizenship at the age of 18 through his Canadian-born mother Maye. He first studied in Canada and then moved to the University of Pennsylvania, where he received a student visa.

In 1995 he moved to Palo Alto, where he got a place at Stanford University, which would have given him another student visa. Student visas give holders the right to work part-time to finance their studies.

But that post revealed that Musk never enrolled in the first place – which would have resulted in his student visa being invalidated. Instead, he worked on his start-up. Dropping out of college to work, even if it's technically unpaid, is simply illegal, Leon Fresco, a former immigration lawyer at the Justice Department, told the newspaper.

“If you're doing anything that contributes to revenue generation, like designing code or trying to make sales to drive revenue generation, then you're in trouble,” Fresco said.

Musk said he recruited his brother to help him run the company. But Kimbal said he actively lied to border officials after he was previously denied entry at the airport on the grounds that he was working illegally in the U.S. when he wanted to return from visiting her mother in Canada. He had a friend drive him across the border and lied that they were watching David Letterman's show so he could conduct what he described in an interview with journalist Graham Bensinger as a critical meeting with investors.

“This is immigration fraud,” said Ira Kurzban, former president and general counsel of American Immigration Lawyers post. “That would make him inadmissible and permanently ban him from entering the United States,” he said, unless the penalties were waived. Additionally, hiring someone who is not authorized to work in the United States is a federal crime.

The Musks' illegal status so worried one investor, Mohr Davidow Ventures, that the agreement included a clause giving the brothers and a third person 45 days to obtain legal status when he paid $3 million in 1996 invested in the company.

Derek Proudian, who served on Zip2's board and later became CEO, said this post Investor sentiment was: “We don’t want our founder to be deported.” He added: “Her immigration status was not what she should be in order to legally run a business in the United States.”

Another investor anonymously told the newspaper: “Perhaps naively we never checked whether he was a legal citizen.”

The post reported that the company's hired attorney told both men not to tell the full truth about their “management” roles and to clean their resumes of American addresses.

Zip2 was sold to Compaq in 1999 for $305 million, with Musk taking $22 million. The company set him on the path that led him to become CEO of PayPal, which in turn led to his involvement with Tesla and the founding of SpaceX. Accordingly, he is currently worth $274 billion Forbes. In 2002 he became a US citizen. False information about prior immigration status on a citizenship application is illegal and may constitute grounds for revocation. It is not known whether Musk made false statements.

In 2005, in an email to Tesla's co-founders that was submitted to a California court, Musk wrote about going to Stanford: “I actually wasn't particularly interested in the degree, but I didn't have the money for a lab and no I have.” no legal right to remain in the country, so this seemed like a good way to solve both problems.”

In 2013, the Musk brothers appeared on a panel at the Milken Institute Global Conference, where Kimball said they were “illegal immigrants” and Musk chimed in, saying it was “a gray area.”

The Daily Beast has reached out to Musk's attorney Alex Spiro for comment. The post said that he, Musk and the manager of Musk's family office did not respond to his request for comment.