What is Elon Musk’s immigration status, and are people really calling the ICE hotline to report him?

The Trump administration is cracking down hard on immigration, even though the president’s “first buddy” Elon Musk, leader of the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), is originally from South Africa.

On January 28, satirical X account The Halfway Post posted a tweet that said: “BREAKING: ICE just announced it is pausing the hotline where people can call to report undocumented immigrants because 90% of the calls are from people reporting Elon Musk.” The tweet went viral, and has been viewed over six million times so far.

This is, unsurprisingly given the nature of the account, a joke.

However, it shone a light on the curious immigration history of the controversial Tesla CEO, with Google searches for the term “Elon Musk illegal status” spiking in the wake of the tweet.

So what, actually, is problematic billionaire Elon Musk’s immigration status? Let’s dive into the topic.

Elon Musk ‘worked in the US illegally in 1995’

In October 2024, The Washington Post shared a bombshell report claiming that Musk was almost certainly working in America without correct authorisation for a period of time in 1995, after he dropped out of Stanford University to work on his debut company, an early online city guide and mapping tool that became Zip2.

The report states that Musk and his brother Kimbal arrived in Palo Alto, California in 1995 on a student visa for a graduate degree program at Stanford University. However, it’s alleged that Elon Musk never enrolled in courses, working instead on his start-up, which he eventually sold for $300 million in 1999.

A former Justice Department immigration litigator confirmed to the Post that “foreign students cannot drop out of school to build a company, even if they are not immediately getting paid.”

In 1996, a firm called Mohr Davidow Ventures invested $3 million into Musk’s new company, but the Washington Post obtained a copy of the funding agreement, which said that the Musk brothers had just 45 days to obtain legal work status. Otherwise, the firm could reclaim its investment.

Elon Musk has repeatedly denied claims he worked without authorisation in the United States, and is a very vocal critic of “illegal immigration.” During a 2020 podcast appearance in which he discussed deferring his studies at Stanford, he said he had a “student-work visa.”

“I was legally there, but I was meant to be doing student work,” he claimed. “I was allowed to do work sort of supporting whatever.” The Tesla CEO also repeated his assertion that he was allowed to work in the US on X.

However, his brother Kimbal previously painted a slightly different story. In a 2013 onstage interview alongside his brother, he spoke about the brothers’ time founding Zip2 and the issues they ran into.

“In fact, when they did fund us, they realized that we were illegal immigrants,” Kimbal said.

“Well….” Elon replied.

“Yes, we were,” Kimbal said.

“I’d say it was a gray area,” Elon replied.

“We were illegal immigrants,” Kimbal responded.

Experts told CNN in September that “student work visa” is not an official term, and that it’s “impossible to know Musk’s immigration path without access to the paper trail in his government file.”

Elon Musk is now an American citizen

A young Elon Musk became a Canadian citizen in 1988, aged just 17. He was entitled to Canadian citizenship because his mother, Maye, was Canadian-born.

He became a naturalised US citizen in 2002, though the route he took to achieve this isn’t entirely clear.

A November 2012 interview and profile with Esquire goes into more detail about that time.

The profile states: “Elon made his (citizenship) move after he graduated high school. Though he already felt like an American, he’d done research and concluded that it would be easier to obtain American citizenship as a Canadian immigrant rather than as a South African one.”

The profile quite deftly skips the 90s “grey area” and moves on to proclaim: “Ten years after his arrival in the New World — Elon Musk took the oath of American citizenship with thirty-five hundred other immigrants at the Pomona Fairplex, in a ceremony he calls ‘actually very moving.'”

What is arguably a lot less moving is the fact that, on Sunday (26 January), a nationwide immigration crackdown resulted in the arrest of 956 non-billionaires, the most since Donald Trump returned to power, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and reported by the BBC.

Trump has carried out 21 executive actions to overhaul the US immigration system since he first took office.

An unnamed man told CBS News that ICE took his wife during the Miami raids at the weekend. “It’s despicable what they’re doing right now… They just came and they snatched her.”