Double standards

Multi-hyphenate billionaire Elon Musk has become a fierce opponent of illegal immigrants, using his considerable audience on X – the social network he owns, formerly called Twitter – to outright spread. racist conspiracy theorists and much more misinformation on the subject.

But there’s an uncomfortable truth that comes out, like CNN reported last month: As his own younger brother once claimed, Musk may have been an illegal immigrant himself.

At an April 2013 conference in California, Kimbal Musk recalled how his and his brother’s startup secured a $3 million investment from venture capitalists.

“When they funded us, they realized we were illegal immigrants,” Kimbal Musk said at the time.

His brother chimed in, saying “it was a gray area” without elaborating. Last time we checked, this doesn’t look like a clear case of legal immigration.

Anti-immigration song

Many questions remain regarding Musk and his brother’s visas when establishing the companies. The couple moved to Palo Alto, California in 1995.

As CNN Points out, two separate biographies of Musk’s life have claimed that investors helped them obtain the appropriate visas, suggesting that they were once raising money without the proper legal documents. One possibility is that Musk started Zip2, an early online mapping company, on a student visa, which typically carries limits on the amount of work that can be done off-campus.

Musk became a full-fledged American citizen in 2002, but the steps leading to that point remain unclear, to say the least. He previously called the process a “laborious Kafkaesque nightmare” and claimed that it was “extremely difficult”.

You’d think this would give him some empathy for immigrants now caught in the vagaries of the immigration process, but instead he’s threw all his weight behind former President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign, and his willingness to welcome others to the United States appears to have withered.

Last month he racist misinformation shared to support Trump’s absurd claim that Haitian immigrants “ate pets.” He also joined other conservative pundits in accusing immigrants of being “cannibals” who should therefore not be allowed to settle in the United States.

In fact, like Bloomberg reported Earlier today, Musk became one of the biggest promoters of anti-immigrant conspiracies on X, formerly Twitter. Many of these comments, often racist, are not accompanied by community ratings, indicating that his lies are spreading unhindered on the platform.

This is a sad situation, indicative of a huge double standard. Despite the personal difficulties encountered by Musk in obtaining American citizenship, he is now clearly determined to slam the door behind him.

Learn more about Musk: Elon Musk responds to concerns that his political antics are weighing on Tesla sales