‘If you want your TEAM to win the championship, you need to recruit top talent wherever they may be,’ Musk wrote.
After Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy made posts on the social platform X this week endorsing an expansion of the visa program for hiring foreign-born highly skilled workers, the two tech billionaires faced backlash from supporters of President-elect Donald Trump over how that program would operate within the new administration’s immigration agenda.
Musk and Ramaswamy, who are set to lead Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency next year, celebrated companies using H-1B visas to hire workers, which is a program that allows employers to hire nonimmigrant foreign-born workers in specialty occupations, giving those workers access to a visa as a condition of their job position.
The two argued that tech companies, including Musk’s, rely on foreign workers for operations, setting off a debate among Trump’s supporters on Musk’s social media platform X. While the president-elect had restricted access to foreign worker visas in his first term and has criticized them in past statements, his 2024 campaign suggested an openness to granting some H-1B visas to foreign-born workers who graduate from a U.S.-based university.
Musk suggested in a Dec. 25 post on X that the United States needed to “double” its number of engineers working as the country is short of “super talented engineers” with the number of “super motivated” people in the country being far too low.
No, we need more like double that number yesterday!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 25, 2024
The number of people who are super talented engineers AND super motivated in the USA is far too low.
Think of this like a pro sports team: if you want your TEAM to win the championship, you need to recruit top talent wherever…
“Think of this like a pro sports team: if you want your TEAM to win the championship, you need to recruit top talent wherever they may be. That enables the whole TEAM to win,” Musk wrote, adding that his companies would “prefer to hire Americans … as that is MUCH easier than going through the incredibly painful and slow work visa process” in another post the same day.
“I am referring to bringing in via legal immigration the top ~0.1% of engineering talent as being essential for America to keep winning,” Musk said in a post on Thursday. “Thinking of America as a pro sports team that has been winning for a long time and wants to keep winning is the right mental construct.”
By Jacob Burg
