Elon Musk ‘was an illegal immigrant’ before becoming open-border critic

South African-born Elon Musk has become one of the biggest critics of illegal immigration in the US, but the billionaire himself had questionable immigration status when he founded his first company in the 1990s.

Although Musk, now 53, entered the country legally in 1995 on a student visa for Stanford, he never actually enrolled in the prestigious California school.

Instead, two days into the semester, he called the department chair to tell them he would not be attending, which should have led to his immediate departure from the country as he had no right to stay under the law. The Washington Post.

However, the entrepreneur did not leave the US and remained in the country as an illegal immigrant to found his first company Zip2 – a moment in his impressive career that he simply calls a ‘gray area’.

Now the founder of Telsa and SpaceX is a major critic of the US border crisis and recently condemned the Biden administration for turning a blind eye to rising immigration numbers coming from the US-Mexico border.

In fact, the world’s richest man – with a staggering net worth of nearly $270 billion – has become one of the biggest donors to Republican candidate and former President Donald Trump ahead of the 2024 elections next month.

Musk has made it his mission to help Trump reinforce his claims that an “open border” and the influx of 2 million immigrants crossing the southern border into the US over the past 12 months have destroyed America.

The immigration issue is central to the 2024 election as major US cities – including New York City and Los Angeles – have buckled under the weight of newcomers.

Despite his vocal comments on the current immigration problem, Musk has remained largely silent on his own migration story.

His brother, Kimbal, on the other hand, has publicly acknowledged that the pair were illegal immigrants to the country during the Zip2 era during a Interview from 2013where he admitted that the siblings slept in their office and showered at the YMCA.

Kimbal revealed that investors were aware of their immigration status when they began financing the directory company they were building.

“When they funded us, they even realized we were illegal immigrants,” he said in the interview.

“Well,” Musk replied.

“Yes, we were,” his brother complained, to which the billionaire replied, “I’d say it was a gray area.”

“We were illegal immigrants,” Kimbal reminded his brother bluntly.

It’s a little-known fact that Musk has largely kept secret as he retells his success story, including the successful – if controversial – acquisition of Twitter, which he later renamed X.

Musk also helped create PayPal, which was transferred to eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002; the acquisition of SolarCity, which was owned by his cousins; and co-founded OpenAI in 2015 before leaving the board in 2018.

Zip2, his first creation, was sold to Compaq Computer Corporation for $300 million in 1999, according to The Washington Post.

Musk likes to tell his story as a journey of personal growth and ambition, leaving out the illegal parts of his success.

According to former Justice Department immigration lawyer Leon Fresco, foreign students are not allowed to drop out of school and start businesses while maintaining their visa status.

“If you do anything that helps facilitate monetization, like design code or try to make sales to facilitate monetization, then you’re in trouble,” he told The Washington Post.

For Zip2 to become a publicly traded company, it would have to be regulated by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, its former employees told the D.C.-based company.

When Mohr Daidow Ventures offered Musk and his team $3 million in 1996, one of the rules of the deal was that the brothers had to obtain legal employment status within 45 days or the money wouldn’t come.

“We don’t want our founder to be deported,” Zip2 board member Derek Proudian told the outlet. “We want to deal with this a long time before anything can go wrong.”

According to six former colleagues, Musk told others he was working under a student visa, The Washington Post reported.

In 2020, the father of 12 claimed he had a student work visa after receiving a deferment from Stanford and was “legally” there.

“But I was supposed to do student work,” he admitted in a podcast, according to The Post. “I was allowed to do work in support of whatever.”

However, in a 2005 email to Telsa co-founder Martin Eberhard and JB Straubel, which was obtained by The Post, Musk had admitted that he was not actually authorized to work in the US at the time.

“I didn’t really care about the degree, but I had no money for a lab and no legal right to stay in the country, so that seemed like a good way to solve both problems,” he had written. “Then came the Internet, which seemed like a much safer bet.”

The brothers had met with immigration attorney Jocelyne Lew in February 1996, who encouraged them to downplay their role in Zip2 and apply for the U.S. visa lottery, according to The Post.

According to Proudian, the brothers did receive a work permit in 1997.

DailyMail.com has reached out to Musk for comment.