Meanwhile, at a rally in support of Donald Trump, Musk said critics of the former president were the real enemies of democracy
The Washington Post reported on Saturday that the South African-born billionaire Elon Musk worked illegally in the United States during a brief period in the 1990s while building a start-up company.
The news outlet reported that Musk arrived in Palo Alto, California, in 1995 to attend Stanford University but never enrolled in his graduate studies programme there.
Instead, he developed software company Zip2, which sold in 1999 for around US$300 million, according to the outlet.
Two immigration law experts quoted by the Post said Musk would have needed to be enrolled in a full course of study to maintain a valid work authorisation as a student.
Musk has endorsed Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump in the November 5 US election.
Trump has for years portrayed migrants as invaders and criminals, and during his 2017-2021 presidency took stringent steps to curb legal and illegal migration. He is promising the biggest effort in US history if he is reelected.
Speaking at a town hall on Saturday night in Pennsylvania to support the former president, Musk played down the January 6 attack on the US Capitol in 2021 and exhorted supporters to cast votes early in the swing state while describing mail ballots as a “recipe for fraud.”
At a freewheeling session inside a ballroom at a hotel in downtown Lancaster to drum up support for the Republican candidate, Musk touched on a dizzying range of topics, from space exploration and the Tesla Cybertruck to immigration and the efficacy of psychiatric drugs.
The town hall was part of Musk’s efforts through his super PAC to help boost Trump in swing states against Democrat Kamala Harris.
Musk, whom Trump has vowed to give a role in his administration if he wins next month, spent nearly two hours taking questions from town hall participants. While most were laudatory and covered a variety of topics, one was particularly pointed: A man wanted to know what Musk would say to concerns from voters that Trump’s election could lead to democracy backsliding in the US considering his role in the January 6 insurrection.
While calling it a fair question, Musk also said that the January 6 attack by Trump’s supporters has been called “some sort of violent insurrection, which is simply not the case” – a response that drew applause from the crowd.
More than 100 law enforcement personnel were injured in the attack, some beaten with their own weapons, when a mob of Trump supporters who believed his claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him stormed the Capitol to stop the certification of votes.
Musk also claimed that people “who say Trump is a threat to democracy are themselves a threat to democracy,” a comment that was also cheered by the crowd of several hundred people packed tightly into the ballroom. Many more watched the event on X, the social media platform Musk bought two years ago.
Trump, he said, “did actually tell people to not be violent.” While Trump did tell the crowd to demonstrate “peacefully and patriotically,” he also encouraged them to “fight like hell” to stop Democrat Joe Biden from becoming the president.
Musk, the world’s richest man, has committed more than US$70 million to boost Trump in the election and, at events on behalf of his super PAC, has encouraged supporters to embrace voting early.
Still, echoing some of Trump’s misgivings about the method, Musk raised his own doubts about the process. He said that, in the future, mail ballots should not be accepted, calling them a strange anomaly that got popularised during the COVID-19 pandemic and raising the prospect of fraud.
There are a number of safeguards to protect mail-in ballots, with various ballot verification protocols, including every state requiring a voter’s signature.
The question about January 6 was an outlier during the back-and-forth with the crowd in which Musk was repeatedly praised as a visionary and solicited for advice and thoughts about education, arm wrestling, tax loopholes, and whether he’d buy the Chicago White Sox.
Musk said he was in favour of “not heavy-handed” regulation of artificial intelligence and railed against “woke religion” as “fundamentally an extinctionist religion.” He said the US birth rate is a significant concern.
He said he believes Jesus was a real person who lived about 2,000 years ago and, when asked for the best advice he’s ever received, replied: “I recommend studying physics.”
He also called a woman to the stage to give her a large US$1 million check, part of his promotion to give away US$1 million a day to a voter in a swing state who has signed his super PAC’s petition backing the US Constitution.
The giveaways are fine with Josh Fox, 32, a UPS driver from Dillsburg, Pennsylvania.
“That is cool,” Fox said, waiting to get into the rally earlier Saturday. “It would be nice to have it.”
Fox, who plans to vote for Trump, dismissed any suggestion the money may violate federal election rules.
“It’s about driving in support and driving in people who are in support of the Constitution,” Fox said.
