- Elon Musk, the world’s wealthiest tycoon, wants more visas for elite engineering talent, but conservative voices including RFK Jr.’s VP pick, Nicole Shanahan, are savaging the program as predatory. The conflict risks rupturing a fragile alliance between tech billionaires who backed Trump over his promise for a light-touch regulatory regime and “America first” supporters who take a hard-line stance against all immigration.
The uneasy alliance between billionaire tech “broligarchs” and MAGA’s heavily nativist base threatens to unravel before Donald Trump even takes office next month.
The two sides are clashing over just how much legal immigration the U.S. needs to maintain its economic and technological lead over rising global power China. Most Americans generally agree with the idea that the U.S. should continue to attract the best and brightest minds the world has to offer—the question is where to draw the cutoff.
And here, reports of Big Tech’s alleged abuse of the H-1B visa have emerged as the fault line in the debate among conservative voices that prefer a wholesale overhaul of the program. The bitter debate represents a rare instance of open warfare between the two sides.
“American workers can leave a company. Imported H-1B workers can’t,” columnist Ann Coulter argued. “Tech wants indentured servants, not ‘high-skilled’ workers.”
Her criticism echoes that of many in the MAGA movement who support a far more hard-line stance symbolic of influential Trump advisor Stephen Miller, who in October argued in favor of an “America for the Americans and Americans only.” His deeply nativist stance even forced the Forward, a leading left-leaning Jewish publication, to call out the descendant of Jewish immigrants for scapegoating minorities.
‘Predatory’ practices by Big Tech
Established as part of the 1990 Immigration Act for “specialty occupations,” the H-1B visa is capped at 65,000 people a year—typically going to nationals from countries like India with demonstrably lower standards of living. This has, to an extent, invited abuse, especially as the minimum $60,000 annual salary threshold is effectively entry-level by today’s standards.
The problem didn’t just emerge recently. Almost a decade ago, Disney was forced to defend itself in a lawsuit that claimed the media giant had Americans train their immigrant replacements.
Later, the journalist who uncovered Elizabeth Holmes’s Theranos fraud even cited her partner, Sunny Balwani, as instrumental to the program aimed at recruiting a team of unquestioning loyalists.
“Most were on H-1B visas and dependent on their continued employment at the company to remain in the country. With a despotic boss like Sunny holding their fates in his hands, it was akin to indentured servitude,” wrote John Carreyrou in his book Bad Blood.
Nicole Shanahan, the former wife of Google cofounder Sergey Brin and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s vice presidential pick, on Thursday subsequently called for a sweeping overhaul to bring the H-1B visa program more in line with Singapore’s more restrictive approach.
“Let’s be real: Tech companies getting massive breaks on cheap labor at the expense of the American way of life is predatory,” she claimed.
Musk defends need for H-1B visas
Elon Musk, one of the most vocal critics of uncontrolled immigration this election year, shot back at such broad generalizations. He likened America to a professional sports team that must recruit from outside in order to maintain its dominance on the field. In other words, even a club like FC Barcelona cannot rely solely on youth sourced from its famed La Masia training academy to compete.
Defending his support for the H-1B visa, Musk wrote on Thursday: “I am referring to bringing in via legal immigration the top ~0.1% of engineering talent as being essential for America to keep winning.”
In reality, however, there are already 20,000 additional H-1B visas issued yearly to elite graduates, for example those with master’s degrees or doctorates like Ilya Sutskever, the famed computer scientist Musk recruited to lead OpenAI’s research.
Musk’s stance is emblematic of what’s been called the “broligarchy,” an elite group of tech-sector entrepreneurs that chafed at the Biden administration’s multipronged regulatory crackdown led by Lina Khan and Gary Gensler, the respective heads of the FTC and SEC federal agencies.
Leading voices among Silicon Valley libertarians, including Marc Andreessen and David Sacks, united to endorse Trump, hoping to ride the antiestablishment wave and profit from the elimination of red tape by Musk and fellow government efficiency czar Vivek Ramaswamy.
The latter, himself of Indian heritage, pushed back on the idea that Americans are being unfairly elbowed out of their jobs by H-1B visa recipients, and claimed critics were “wallowing in victimhood.”
Clash comes amid speculation Musk-Trump alliance is fragile
Instead of complaining, Americans should watch less television and read more books if they want to compete with foreign skilled labor for STEM jobs, Ramaswamy argued on Thursday.
The problem is, the biotech entrepreneur was all too happy to agree with conservative voices like Coulter while he was campaigning for the Republican nomination a year ago.
“It’s a form of indentured servitude that only accrues to the benefit of the company that sponsored an H-1B immigrant. I’ll gut it,” he told Politico in September 2023, promising a reform focusing solely on merit rather than the current lottery-based system. On Thursday, Ramaswamy reaffirmed he still stands behind those words.
Speculators have recently questioned how long the uneasy alliance between Musk’s camp and Trump’s MAGA base will last, given that there is not enough space for two alpha males to run the White House.
If this clash were limited to just the issue of H-1B visas, the damage could potentially be contained. But the world’s wealthiest tycoon is now facing claims he may be putting his thumb on the scale by throttling the reach of influential MAGA accounts critical of his stance favoring H-1B visas, much like Musk appears to do with left-leaning accounts.
This goes to the very heart of the alliance: a shared belief that leftist social-media companies and the Biden administration were collaborating to promote censorship and undermine the First Amendment guaranteeing free speech.
“Never insult the monarch,” wrote Mike Cernovich, a popular alt-right influencer, in a dig at Musk. Cernovich has been a vocal opponent of the program and called for congressional hearings into the subject of H-1B visa abuse.
Fortune reached out to X for comment, but did not receive a reply by press time.
