By Nandita Bose
WEST PALM BEACH, Florida (Reuters) – Elon Musk, the billionaire CEO of Tesla (NASDAQ: ) and SpaceX, has vowed to “go to war” to protect the H-1B visa program for workers of foreign technology on Friday amid a clash between President-elect Donald Trump's longtime supporters and his more recent supporters in the tech industry.
In a post on the social media platform X, Musk said “The reason I'm in America and the many critical people who build SpaceX, Tesla and hundreds of other companies that make America strong is because of H1B.”
“I will fight for this issue that you cannot understand,” he added.
Musk, a US citizen born in South Africa, holds an H-1B visa, and his electric car company Tesla has received 724 visas this year. H-1B visas are normally valid for three years, although holders can extend them or apply for green cards.
Musk's tweet was aimed at Trump supporters and immigrant workers, who have pushed for the H-1B visa program to be scrapped amid a heated debate over immigration and the place of skilled immigrants and foreign workers brought into the country on work visas.
Trump has remained silent on the issue. The Trump administration did not respond to a request for comment on Musk's tweets and the H-1B visa debate.
In the past, Trump has expressed a willingness to offer more work visas to skilled workers. He also promised to deport all illegal immigrants in the US, impose taxes to help create more jobs for Americans and severely restrict immigration.
The issue shows how tech leaders like Musk — who has taken a key role in the presidential transition, advising on key staff and policy areas — are now drawing attention from his base.
The US tech industry relies on the government's H-1B visa program to hire skilled foreign workers to help run their companies, workers who critics say drive down the wages of American citizens.
The controversy was sparked earlier this week by right-wing activists who criticized Trump's selection of Sriram Krishnan, an Indian-American venture capitalist, to be an adviser on artificial intelligence, saying he would influence the Trump administration's immigration policies.
On Friday, Steve Bannon, a longtime Trump confidante, criticized the “big tech oligarchs” for supporting the H-1B program and cast immigration as a threat to Western civilization.
In response, Musk and many other tech billionaires draw a line between what they see as legal immigration and illegal immigration.
Musk spent more than a quarter of a billion dollars helping Trump win the presidency in November. He has posted regularly this week about the lack of local talent to fill all the positions needed at American tech companies.