Recent reports suggest that Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, may have worked in the United States without proper authorization during the 1990s. If it’s proven that he misrepresented this information during his immigration process, legal experts indicate that his U.S. citizenship could be at risk. Musk, originally from South Africa, moved to Canada before eventually settling in the U.S. In 1995, he was admitted to Stanford University but did not enroll, opting instead to work on a startup. This decision may have left him without legal status to work in the U.S. at that time. Musk denies any wrongdoing, stating he was on a J-1 visa that transitioned to an H1-B visa. Legal experts note that working without authorization and misrepresenting such information during the immigration process can lead to denaturalization.
Elon Musk could have his United States citizenship revoked and be exposed to criminal prosecution if he lied to the government as part of the immigration process, according to legal experts.
Musk, who was born and raised in South Africa and later emigrated to Canada before eventually settling in the US and becoming a citizen, has spent more than $100 million to support Donald Trump and his nativist presidential campaign, and has personally demonized immigrants. A recent Bloomberg analysis found, for example, that Musk has posted around 1,300 times on X this year about immigration and voter fraud. Many of those posts promote the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, which falsely holds that Democrats seek to replace white voters with unauthorized immigrants whose votes they control, and depicts immigrants as dangerous lawbreakers.
Earlier this week, though, The Washington Post reported that Musk was himself an immigrant who had apparently broken the law. In the 1990s, he worked illegally in the United States, according to the Post, which cited “former business associates, court records and company documents.”
In 1995, according to the Post, Musk was admitted to graduate school at Stanford but didn’t enroll in classes, instead working on an online services startup that would eventually be known as Zip2. (Stanford did not reply to requests for comment.) In 1996, the Post reported, investors made a funding agreement contingent on Musk and his brother Kimbal—who has stated that the brothers were “illegal immigrants”—obtaining authorization to work in the US within 45 days. “Their immigration status was not what it should be for them to be legally employed running a company in the US,” Zip2 board member Derek Proudian told the Post.
Musk denies that he ever worked illegally in the US. (His lawyer, Alex Spiro, and a spokesperson for X, which he owns, did not reply to requests for comment.) He claims that in 1995, as a student, he was in the US on a J-1 visa, which then “transitioned” to an H1-B visa. As the Post reported, though, in a 2005 email that was entered into evidence in a since-closed defamation lawsuit in California, he wrote that he had applied to Stanford because he otherwise had “no legal right to stay in the country.” Musk then reportedly didn’t enroll at Stanford, instead working on the project that would become Zip2.
Someone present in the US on a student visa who didn’t enroll in courses would have had no right to work at the time and would have had to leave the country, according to experts WIRED consulted. (He did ultimately receive work authorization in 1997.)
Overstaying a student visa was, and to a much lesser extent still is, relatively common. Working without authorization and lying about it during the immigration process would be, however, a black-letter violation of US law carrying significant penalties, albeit one enforced fairly rarely, say experts.
Stephen Yale-Loehr, a professor at Cornell Law School and faculty director of its Immigration Law and Policy Program, says that it’s not clear that if Musk worked in the US without authorization and attested he hadn’t, that would be considered important enough to denaturalize him. However, he says, “on purely legal grounds, this would justify revoking citizenship, because if he had told the truth, he would not have been eligible for an H1-B, a green card, or naturalization.”
Other experts agree. Amanda Frost, who teaches immigration and citizenship law at the University of Virginia, could not speak to Musk’s case specifically, but says that having worked without authorization can be a bar to obtaining a green card.
“If a noncitizen violated the terms of a nonimmigrant visa, and then adjusted to immigrant (green card) status without admitting the violation, and then naturalized without admitting the violation, that person could be denaturalized on the ground that their naturalization was ‘illegally procured,’” she tells WIRED. “That very broadly worded provision would seem to apply to any violation of law during the immigration/naturalization process, even minor and unintentional violations of the law.”
US law—specifically, 8 U.S.C. § 1451—allows for the revocation of naturalization if citizenship was “procured by concealment of a material fact or by willful misrepresentation.” The classic example of the law’s application is to former Nazis who ultimately had their citizenship stripped in the US after the exposure of their hidden pasts. But the law, experts say…
