With Elon Musk making it to the top 10 wealthiest people in the world, he’s now more in the limelight than ever. With other non-Americans on the list, the question a lot of people are asking is, is Elon Musk American?
While he was born in South Africa to a mixed family, Elon Musk immigrated to the United States of America without his family and became a full American citizen shortly thereafter. He holds dual nationalities, but lives and works in the USA.
What inspired Elon Musk to take citizenship, and does he treat non-US citizens the same way in his companies? Read on to find out more!
Elon Musk Holds Three Citizenships
Elon Musk’s family history is interesting, to say the least. He was abandoned by his father when Elon was very young – some sources say he was just eight years old – and he spent most of his childhood reading comic books.
Elon realized, having had gone on annual trips with his father, that the world was a large place full of amazing opportunities. His father’s insistence of America being a place of self-made people led to Elon deciding to go to the US at age 15.
He accomplished this by calling in a favor with a neighbor… to be specific, America’s neighbor, Canada. Elon’s mother was born in Canada, and so Musk found himself homeless in Montreal soon enough, buzzing with passion and ideas.
It’s worth mentioning that Musk was not a native African. He is named after his great-great-grandfather, but his “ grandfather and great-grandfather were both born in Minnesota.”
His goal was to self-fund his education and to take his business ideas forward in the way that best suited him at the time. He did this through odd jobs at farms and a lumber mill, ultimately doing enough to be able to go to Ontario to attend Queen’s University. He used that as a launching board to jump to the University of Pennsylvania where he graduated in Economics and Physics, and this spirit of using opportunities as launching pads seems to have stuck with him ever since.
Of course, that didn’t stop him from racking up six figures in college debt just like the rest of us.
Musk commented on the experience: “For a lot of companies, they do want to see the completion of the degree because they are looking for someone who’s [going to] persevere and see it through to the end… it really depends on what somebody’s goal is; if the goal is to start a company, I would say there’s no point in finishing college. In my case I had to, otherwise, I’d get kicked out of the country… the H-1B visa requires a degree. [Other than that,] if that wasn’t the case, I probably would’ve stopped education sooner.”
About people facing similar struggles, Musk said: “It’s quite difficult for us to employ people that don’t have a green card because of US ITAR rules. So, my first advice would be, do anything you can to get a green card. We have been successful in a few cases with getting permission from the US state department, defense department, to appoint non-US citizens but it’s very difficult to do that, unfortunately. I wish it were easier.”
Elon Musk Became An American In 2002
From 1989 onwards, Elon Musk had his feet firmly established in the international. He had moved to Canada, and soon to the US, living in a foreign students’ dorm. There he started his first business and soon made his first millions. He followed this up with making his relationship with the USA official. He took his oath for the American citizenship in a “very moving” ceremony at the Pomona Fairplex, along with 3500 others.
Elon Musk calls America the land of opportunity. “There is definitely no other country where I could have done this,” he says, “immigrant or not.” In his own words, “I paid my own way through college — through student loans, scholarships, working jobs — and ended up with $100,000 of student debt. I started my first company [Zip2] with $2,500, and I had one computer and a car that I bought for $1,400, and all that debt.”
From there, Musk took a journey from selling Zip2 for $300m, founding what became PayPal, and selling PayPal for a still-legendary figure of $1.5b. It was this that led him to be able to pursue both SpaceX and Tesla, and soon, The Boring Company – and today he stands in the top ten richest people in the world, going from millionaire to billionaire to multibillionaire, all in a little over 20 years.