Bureaucrats and tech writers do not like Elon Musk, his technical achievements notwithstanding. His social media company, X, has been targeted by political activists; there have been calls for him to be arrested, and now there seems to be a move afoot to revoke his U.S. citizenship. At Wired, Tim Marchman reports on claims that he was working illegally in the United States before becoming a citizen:

In 1995, according to the Post, Musk was admitted to graduate school at Stanford but didn’t enroll in classes, instead working on an online services startup that would eventually be known as Zip2. (Stanford did not reply to requests for comment.) In 1996, the Post reported, investors made a funding agreement contingent on Musk and his brother Kimbal—who has stated that the brothers were “illegal immigrants”—obtaining authorization to work in the US within 45 days. “Their immigration status was not what it should be for them to be legally employed running a company in the US,” Zip2 board member Derek Proudian told the Post.

Musk denies that he ever worked illegally in the US. (His lawyer, Alex Spiro, and a spokesperson for X, which he owns, did not reply to requests for comment.) He claims that in 1995, as a student, he was in the US on a J-1 visa, which then “transitioned” to an H1-B visa. As the Post reported, though, in a 2005 email that was entered into evidence in a since-closed defamation lawsuit in California, he wrote that he had applied to Stanford because he otherwise had “no legal right to stay in the country.” Musk then reportedly didn’t enroll at Stanford, instead working on the project that would become Zip2.

“Elon Musk Could Have US Citizenship Revoked If He Lied on Immigration Forms,” October 31, 2024

The case, we are told, could be referred to the U.S. Attorney’s office, whose prosecutors have “broad discretion” as to whether they want to prosecute.

Possibly Musk’s worst offense (that anyone really cares about) is a tendency toward AI hokum. But he shares that trait with a huge chunk of his industry, as technology consultant Jeffrey Funk points out.

It’s hard to avoid the suspicion that Musk’s main offence is that he does things that more bureaucratic competitors can’t do. Will he, for example, send scouts to Mars? As things stand, he is more likely to do so than NASA is.

Similarly, legacy media — in terminal decline as free market corporations — hate him. But he is surely right to say that today’s technology means that anyone with a story can become the media. Thus legacy media now control news only for those who choose them. They cannot be expected to like that and there are many moves afoot to start controlling the news again.