President Joe Biden called Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, now a Republican megadonor and Trump campaign surrogate, for his hypocrisy on immigration on Saturday, saying Musk launched his long career in the US as an “illegal worker” before becoming the world’s richest man.
The president said this at a campaign event to support Democrats held in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on Saturday.
Labeling Musk as former President Donald Trump’s wealthy new “ally,” Biden said, “The richest man in the world is an illegal worker while he’s here,” referring to Musk.
“He was supposed to be in school when he came on a student visa. He’s not in school. He’s breaking the law. He’s talking about all these ‘illegals,'” Biden added.
He later criticized Trump and Republicans for failing to sign legislation that would fix “the problem with the border.” He added, “We have fewer people crossing the border illegally today — or crossing the border period — than at any time since the third year of the President of the United States.”
The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment on Biden’s remarks.
Musk recently completed a series of “town hall” events in the same swing state of Pennsylvania, where he is trying to get voters to support Trump and Trump’s policies. Musk also built a fan base there by offering a $1 million lottery-style prize to registered voters in swing states who signed a petition circulated by the 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 visas and deporting pro-Palestinian foreign students, among others. .
Biden’s comments about Musk, Trump’s alliance and hypocrisy on immigration followed a Washington Post report citing correspondence, legal records and numerous people who helped Musk obtain a work visa in 1996 after he had worked here without one.
Musk had come to the US with the intention of attending graduate school at Stanford in the mid-90s. He didn’t enroll in the program he said he was accepted for 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 worried about “‘deported founders’ and given deadlines to get work visas.”
Zip2 sold for chapters $300 million in 1999, a fortune that made Elon Musk an early investor and chairman of Tesla, and started the capital-intensive aerospace venture SpaceX, which is now a major US defense contractor.
The business makes Musk the richest man on paper. According to Forbes, the Tesla CEO’s net worth is currently $274 billion.
At the end of 2022, Musk used his wealth to acquire the social network Twitter by buying it for $44 billion.
On the platform, since changing his name to X, Musk has repeatedly claimed in posts seen by his large online fan base that “open borders” and undocumented immigrants could destroy the United States.
He also pointed to the false claim that non-citizens systematically vote in US elections, a conspiracy theory floated by conservative groups to create a legal basis for contesting the election results if the Democratic candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris, wins the presidency.
In the US, it is a federal crime and a crime under state law for non-citizens to register or vote in federal elections.
According to a study compiled by the Brennan Center for Justice, “extensive research shows that fraud is rare, voter impersonation is almost non-existent, and many cases of fraud are, in fact, the fault of voters or administrators. The same is true for mail. ballots, which are safe and important for conduct safe elections amid the coronavirus pandemic.
— CNBC’s Rebecca Picciotto contributed to this report.
