Elon Musk's defense of the H-1B visa as a necessary component to empower the American tech workforce has come under scrutiny, especially in light of the lack of such visas needed to keep SpaceX at the top of its field in space exploration and rocket engineering.
Why It Matters
Musk, along with Vivek Ramaswamy, has been at odds with MAGA faithful over the issue of H-1B visas, which allow foreign workers with specified skillsets to live and work in the United States so long as they have an employer willing to sponsor them.
Musk himself benefited greatly from the H-1B visa program, having first entered the U.S. on a J-1 academic visa that he says changed to an H-1B visa. Some of his companies, such as Tesla, rely on the program for their workforce: Tesla brough in 724 employees in 2023 on H-1B visas.
However, he also represents a counter-example in his company Space Exploration Technologies Corp., known colloquially as SpaceX.
What To Know
SpaceX, which is privately held, has an estimated market capitalization of roughly $350 billion, based on a secondary share sale. That would make it one of the top 30 companies by market cap in the country (private companies do not have to publicly release detailed financial data).
The company has had a banner year: its Starlink satellite-based internet constellation has grown into a behemoth as traffic tripled in 2024, with Musk himself estimating Starlink could represent at least half of SpaceX's overall valuation.
In October SpaceX also demonstrated the reusability of its Starship rocket technology by "catching" its booster with mechanical arms for the first time.
To reach those and other milestones, SpaceX has hired just 17 H-1B workers between 2011 and 2024, according to the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). Data on the service's website shows a single H-1B rejection in that period.
This is largely because the U.S. has for years mandated the hiring of U.S. citizens and green-card holders over foreign workers for certain sensitive industries and technologies, such as defense, under a set of regulations known as International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR). SpaceX is a significant defense contractor.
Other defense contractors operate with similarly few foreign workers. Northrop Grumman does not even come up in the H-1B database, while Lockheed Martin, one of the largest defense contractors in the country, had a grand total of 11 H-1B visas approved. Boeing had just under 100 H-1B visas approved since 2009.
Newsweek reached out to SpaceX, Elon Musk and Northrop Grumman by email for comment on Friday morning.
By comparison, Big Tech companies that do not contract with the federal government on defense in any significant way have higher numbers: Spotify has had dozens of approved H-1B visas almost every year, especially after the pandemic, with 35 approved in 2020, 43 approved in 2021, 45 approved in 2022, 22 approved in 2023 and 41 approved in 2024. Google pulled around 1,043 H-1B visa approvals in 2024 alone, while the IT consulting firm Cognizant secured 6,321 H-1B approvals this year.
What People Are Saying
President-elect Donald Trump earlier this year said that anyone graduating from a U.S. college should get a green card automatically in order to keep jobs in the U.S.: "If you graduate from a U.S. college—two-year, four-year, or doctoral—you should automatically get a green card to stay," Trump said during an appearance on "The All-In Podcast" in June. "Too often, talented grads are forced to leave and start billion-dollar companies in India or China instead of here. That success and those jobs should be in America."
David Axelrod, President Barack Obama's chief campaign strategist and former Senior Advisor to the President in the White House, wrote on X Friday: "This was one of the inevitable schisms between Elon and the billionaire techies who funded Trump's campaign, and the voters who elected him. They are globalists bankrolling a populist movement for their own purposes."
Ed Krassenstein, a Trump-critical influencer, wrote on X Friday: "MAGA is outraged that Elon Musk is pro H-1B Visa. Someone should tell them that Trump Organization and Trump's Mar-a-Lag resorts frequently used H-1B visas to hire employees from outside of America."
What Happens Next
Musk and Ramaswamy, who have been given charge of the newly created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), have continued to press their case even against the backdrop of a days-long MAGA backlash over the need for H-1B labor.
The president-elect, meanwhile, has been quiet on the issue since his remarks during the campaign. Trump will have wide authority to rework the H-1B system should he want it, using executive orders as he did in 2020.
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