Decades before becoming the world’s richest person and a major supporter of President-elect Donald Trump, tech mogul Elon Musk was accepted into a graduate program at Stanford — a program he never never followed.

Instead, South African-born Musk used his brief affiliation with the university to claim temporary legal immigration status and launch his first business, even as he worked illegally in the United States, according to former associates and documents obtained by The Washington Post last month.

Reporting about Musk’s immigration status in the 1990s came just before the presidential election, which saw Trump re-elected partly on the promise of launching mass expulsions of undocumented immigrants. Musk, who donate more than $100 million for Trump’s campaign and who has frequently joined the president-elect at his rallies, is a vocal critic of illegal immigration.

“We should not allow people into the country if they are breaking the law,” he said. said during a visit to the US-Mexico border in 2023.

Musk’s two-day stay in 1995 in a graduate program at Stanford – before leaving to launch his first company, Zip2 – was an important part of his entrepreneurial personality.

The Post cited a 2020 podcast interview, in which Musk said: “I was there legally, but I was supposed to be doing student work. I was allowed to do work to support anything.

Luisa Rapport, the university’s director of media relations, confirmed in an email to The Daily that Musk applied and was accepted to a graduate program in materials science and engineering. However, Rapport wrote that the University has “no record of his enrollment.”

Although he has openly discussed his withdrawal from graduate school at Stanford, Musk has never publicly addressed its connection to his legal professional status. According to legal experts who spoke to the Post, his decision to leave the program and start a startup meant he had no legal basis to remain in the United States.

At an event in 2013, Musk’s brother and co-founder of Zip2, Kimbal Musk, recalled that the brothers “were illegal immigrants.” Elon Musk responded on stage that it was “more of a gray area.”

Derek Proudian, a former Zip2 board member, told the Washington Post that their immigration status at the time “was not where it should be for them to be legally employed as CEOs.” ‘a company in the United States’.

The Post also reported on a 2005 email in which Musk wrote to two Tesla co-founders that he had applied to Stanford to stay in the United States.

“I actually didn’t really care about the degree, but I didn’t have money for a lab or the legal right to stay in the country, so it seemed like a good way to solve both problems,” reportedly writes Musk. “Then the Internet came along, which seemed like a much safer bet.”

President Joe Biden critical Musk for hypocrisy at Democratic campaign event following Washington Post report. “He was supposed to be in school when he arrived on a student visa,” Biden said. “He wasn’t at school. He was breaking the law. He’s talking about all these ‘illegals’ heading our way.”

Following these remarks, Musk denied working illegally in the United States. “I was actually authorized to work in the United States,” he said. wrote on X.

The Daily contacted Elon Musk and his lawyer, Alex Spiro, for comment.

In 2022, before acquiring Twitter and renaming the platform X, Musk shared a letter he received from Professor Emeritus of Materials Science and Engineering William Nix MS ’60 Ph.D. ’63 regarding use of silicon for lithium batteries. “Nice letter from Bill Nix, who would have been my professor at Stanford if I had not (permanently) suspended my graduate studies,” Musk subtitle the image, in a tweet that garnered more than 100,000 likes.

Nix told the Daily he sent the letter following a 2022 interview in which Musk said Nix was “the person I spoke to when I said I would like to put my studies on hold.”

Although he saw “no reason to doubt” Musk’s account and acknowledged that it was plausible, Nix said he had “no memory” of his meeting with Musk in 1995.

Nix also said that Musk’s decision to withdraw from the program to pursue entrepreneurship would have been “extremely rare” among material science students at the time. “I can’t remember any other case where someone came, became a student, and then immediately left and started (a business),” he said.

Many articles and online biographies have claimed that in addition to materials science, Musk also started a doctoral program in applied physics at Stanford. However, in an email to The Daily, the University only confirmed Musk’s application and acceptance to Stanford’s “graduate program in materials science and engineering.”

Professor Aharon Kapitulink was director of admissions in the applied physics department for several years before becoming chair of the department in September 1996. He wrote to the Daily that he “does not remember the application, and I do not remember nor of Musk as a graduate student.”

Kapitulnik added that Stanford’s graduate programs, including the applied physics department, welcomed top students from around the world in the 1990s.

The department, he wrote, “strives to ensure the quality of the graduate students we admit. We do not take into account visas or any other quotas.

Musk appears to be playing a major role in Trump’s presidential transition and, recently, joined the president-elect for a call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Trump also praised Musk’s approach to cost-cutting in business, fueling speculation that Musk could lead efforts to reduce public spending.

In a Sunday article on X, Musk voiced his support to “ensure that maniacal, dedicated small-government revolutionaries join this administration!” »