Tech billionaire Elon Musk grew up in South Africa and emigrated to Canada in 1989 before moving to the U.S. in the 1990s, but the precise timeline has always been somewhat murky. In the dramatic June 2025 fallout between U.S. President Donald Trump and Musk, his former adviser, calls for the latter's deportation grew louder.
For example, Steve Bannon — chief strategist to Trump until the latter fired him in 2017 — said in an interview with The New York Times (archived) on June 5, 2025, "They should initiate a formal investigation of [Musk's] immigration status, because I am of the strong belief that he is an illegal alien, and he should be deported from the country immediately." We reached out to the press office for comment from Tesla, which Musk helms, and will update this story if we receive a response.
Posts of Bannon's claim (archived, archived, archived, archived) collectively gained millions of views, as of this writing.
In 2013, Musk's brother, Kimbal Musk, said in an interview, "We were illegal immigrants," to which Elon Musk replied, "I'd say it was a gray area."
As Musk increasingly aligned himself with Trump leading up to the 2024 election, he became more vocal about his opinions on immigration, writing on X in February 2024 (archived), "I am very much PRO increasing legal immigration significantly."
As a reminder, I am very much PRO increasing legal immigration significantly.
I'm not anti-immigration, I'm just against a massive number of unvetted people flooding into America, which any rational person should be.— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 3, 2024
In both 2016 and 2024 we covered available evidence of the claim, and found his brother's assertion to be unproven. In the aftermath of Musk's swift rise to power in the White House and subsequent fall from Trump's grace, we reexamine the facts below.
Is there evidence that Musk was undocumented?
In 1992, Musk came to the U.S. as an undergraduate student enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania, which he transferred to from Queen's University in Ontario, Canada. According to a 2012 Esquire profile, he'd decided that it would be easier to obtain American citizenship as a Canadian immigrant rather than as a South African one, as his mother was Canadian.
There has been some confusion regarding the year he received his undergraduate degree — Musk has on previous occasions claimed he received the degree in 1995 — but the University of Pennsylvania says it awarded the degree in 1997. It's unclear whether he engaged in Optional Practical Training (OPT), a temporary work authorization often granted to international students in the U.S., during this time. Musk claimed he received his degree later due to leftover credits he was unable to complete as he planned to enroll in graduate school at Stanford. According to an appendix in a biography on Musk by Ashlee Vance:
Musk also had an explanation for the weird timing on his degrees from Penn. "I had a History and an English credit that I agreed with Penn that I would do at Stanford," he said. "Then I put Stanford on deferment. Later, Penn's requirements changed so that you don't need the English and History credit. So then they awarded me the degree in '97 when it was clear I was not going to go to grad school, and their requirement was no longer there.
However, he never completed a degree at Stanford, instead dropping out two days into his graduate program to pursue building his first startup, Zip2, with his brother, Kimbal Musk.
In a 2013 interview with both Elon Musk and Kimbal Musk, Kimbal Musk stated, "We were illegal immigrants" (at minute 9:14), and Elon Musk countered, saying that it was a "gray area":
Almost 10 years later, in 2021, Elon and Kimbal Musk held a conversation on the podcast Third Row Tesla in which Kimbal Musk confirmed that he was "not legally in America" early in their career, while Elon Musk maintained that he was legally in the U.S. because he had a student work visa, despite deferring his enrollment at Stanford. They said:
Kimbal: I don't know if you were, but I was not legally in America. So I was illegally there.
Elon: I was legally there. But I was meant to be student work. I had a student work visa.
Kimbal: You were supposed to be doing a Ph.D. at Stanford and decided not to.
Elon: I was allowed to do work, sort of supporting, whatever, you know.
Kimbal: I tried to get a visa, but there's just no visa you can get to do a startup.
Elon: Yeah, unfortunately, nobody was paying you anything either.
Kimbal: And so we ended up getting … — We got a deal from Mohr Davidow and this really hot, well-respected DC firm. And we had to break the news to them that we take the bus … we took the bus to get to the offices. We don't have a car, and we don't have an apartment. And we are illegal.
Elon: No, no, you're illegal. I was legal, but my visa was gonna run out in two years. Student visa.
Kimbal: Okay. I was definitely illegal. We needed to get it sorted.
The portion of the conversation in question began at minute 1:13:02.
At minute 1:15:37, the brothers also claimed they were not breaking the law by working because they were "not being paid anything."
So while Elon Musk himself confirmed that he was on a student visa set to expire in two years while he was not studying and was instead working in the tech sphere, it all comes down to:
- Whether was legal to not enroll at an institution and instead work while on a student visa
- Whether they were technically working, given that they allegedly "were not being paid anything" while working on their internet startup
According to an investigation by The Washington Post in October 2024 (archived), Musk did not have the legal right to work while building the company that became Zip2. The story claimed that in a 2005 email used in a defamation lawsuit, Musk himself admitted that he applied to Stanford because he otherwise had "no legal right to stay in the country."
The Post spoke with several of Musk's former business associates in Silicon Valley from the 1990s and with immigration experts. The report did not clarify whether those immigration experts had any direct working knowledge of Musk's immigration case.
"If you do anything that helps to facilitate revenue creation, such as design code or try to make sales in furtherance of revenue creation, then you're in trouble," Leon Fresco, a former Justice Department immigration litigator, told The Washington Post.