Elon Musk proposes changes to H-1B visa: Raising minimum salary and more

“I’ve been very clear that the [programme] is broken and needs major reform,” posted the wealthiest person in the world, Elon Musk, in an interaction of his social media platform X (Formerly, Twitter) on Sunday. This sounded like the Tesla CEO backtracking on him stating he would “go to war” defending the H-1B visa just days ago.

Last week, ardent Donald Trump supporters clashed with Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy over the topic of immigrant visas. Both the tech entrepreneurs, who are expected to hold influential positions in the incoming Trump administration, backed the H-1B visa programme then. 

“America rose to greatness over the past 150 years, because it was a meritocracy more than anywhere else on Earth. I will fight to my last drop of blood to ensure that it remains that land of freedom and opportunity,” Musk posted on X over the weekend.

“A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers,” tweeted Ramaswamy last week, in a post that strongly supported H-1B.

“Trump’s election hopefully marks the beginning of a new golden era in America, but only if our culture fully wakes up. A culture that once again prioritizes achievement over normalcy; excellence over mediocrity; nerdiness over conformity; hard work over laziness,” he added.

However, later on Sunday, in an interaction with a user, Musk clarified his stance on H-1B. He said that the programme could be “easily fixed by raising the minimum salary significantly and adding a yearly cost for maintaining the H-1B, making it materially more expensive to hire from overseas than domestically.”

In the meantime, Elon-led rocketship firm SpaceX launched two back-to-back missions over Saturday and Sunday. The last launch of 2024 is expected to be on Tuesday morning, which is a Starlink mission to deploy 21 satellites.