PROOF EXCLUSIVE: Elon Musk’s Many Years As An Illegal Immigrant
This carefully researched and sourced series investigating Musk’s immigration status from 1988 through his receipt of US citizenship in 2002 reveals shocking new details about the world’s richest man.
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Introduction
It’s hard for me not to feel bad for Elon Musk biographer Ashlee Vance.
As a Donald Trump biographer and presidential historian who wrote three national bestsellers on the most prolific liar in American political history, I had to decide early on that I would never cite—at least not for the truth of the matter—any source with a clear and consistent reputation for deceit unless the source in question was making what we criminal defense attorneys would call “a statement against [self-]interest.”
But when Vance was writing his 2015-published Musk biography in the early- to mid-2010s, he couldn’t have known—as really, far fewer of us in journalism did than would be the case today—that he was using as his foremost source a man who may well be the most prolific liar in the history of American business (with some consideration of this question accessible via these reports by Gizmodo, The Washington Post, Jalopnik, CNN, The Verge, The Los Angeles Times, Inc, The Wrap, Yahoo News, CBS News, Le Monde, The Times of India, Business Insider, Forbes, WIRED, NDTV, Boing Boing, India Today, HuffPost, Philanthropy News Digest, Fortune, Drive, WIRED (again), Yahoo Finance, Road and Track, Platformer, MIT Technology Review, Cheapism, The Associated Press, The American Genius and Techdirt, to name just a few of hundreds).
The result of Musk consistently pulling the wool over Vance’s eyes, as Musk has done to so many people across the world over the last 25 years, is that a bestselling book (Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future) is filled with claims and timelines that make no sense whatsoever. Some of these should have been detected by Vance’s editors at Ecco—I know from thirty years of experience as a working author that it can difficult to catch your own errors and false presumptions—but others are quite simply the product of a now decades-long disinformation campaign that’s been waged by the world’s second-richest man against journalists purely out of spite.
Ashlee Vance was, in my estimation, an unwitting mark for and victim of this spite, not a willing accomplice.
Even so, what this entry in the ongoing Proof series analyzing Elon Musk’s years as an illegal immigrant aims to do is tease out some of the worst lies Musk appears to have told Vance. Most of these apparent lies have one thing in common: they obscure Mr. Musk’s immigration status during a decade-long period in his life: from 1988 to 1997.
These (at best) misstatements and (at worst) deliberate deceptions were—and are—essential to Musk’s self-made mythology because (a) they enable him to demagogue on Twitter on a daily basis the political question of U.S. immigration policy without his highly inflammatory rhetoric being ignored due to his evident hypocrisy on the matter of illegal immigration; (b) they help ensure that few or no questions will be asked of either Elon or his brother Kimbal Musk about whether they lied on federal forms to gain their U.S. citizenship (with any such lies causing problems for Elon’s status as a U.S. citizen and perhaps his status as one of the leading federal contractors with the Department of Defense, as that position is threatened by a contractor’s vulnerability to blackmail); and (c) they give him a jumping-off point for performing a sinister breed of racism and white identity politics that clearly appeals to him personally but also bolsters his newest quest, that being to re-elect Donald Trump—a bigot whose return to the White House would ensure Musk remains a federal government contractor in good standing, a presidential adviser who is actually listened to (rather than a pariah in the eyes of the Biden administration), and an influential mover-and-shaker behind the party that would rule Washington in the event of a return to power by Mr. Trump.
Musk’s two primary goals—making money and being loved—are both served, and served best, by backing MAGA demagogues in 2024. And right now those people are focused on a topic that clearly means little to Musk personally: illegal immigration.
But to stand alongside MAGA demagogues on immigration as Trumpism continues its decade of expansion in American politics, Musk has had to ensure that articles and books about him published during The MAGA Era—which began in June 2015—don’t encourage enterprising journalists or citizen researchers to look at the possibility that Musk was a longtime crypto-illegal immigrant himself. Which, as it happens, he was.