Elon Musk is Chief Executive Officer and Product Architect at Tesla, and founder, Chief Executive Officer, and Chief Engineer at Space X, and is the founder of xAI, a firm which owns X (formerly Twitter).
| Photo Credit: KENT NISHIMURA

“I think America has benefited immensely from talented Indians that have come to America,” Elon Musk, American entrepreneur, said in a conversation with Nikhil Kamath, Bengaluru-based entrepreneur and co-founder of Zerodha.

But when asked why the climate around US immigration appears to have shifted for Indians, Musk responded, “It was basically a total free-for-all with no border controls… Unless you’ve got border controls, you’re not a country.”

Mr. Musk, who is Chief Executive Officer and Product Architect at Tesla and founder, Chief Executive Officer, and Chief Engineer at Space X, further said, “This (the immigration system) produced massive amounts of illegal immigration under the Biden administration,” and even a ‘negative selection effect’ where poorly designed incentives attracted the wrong kind of inflow. “And this created a perception in the U.S. that the country’s jobs were being taken by talented people from other countries,” he added.

“There has been some misuse of the H1B programme. Some of the outsourcing companies have kind of gamed the system,’’ he stated while speaking in a podcast by People by WTF. He told Mr. Kamath that ‘it was important to fix those abuses’.

“We need to stop the gaming of the system… but I’m certainly not in the school of thought that we should shut down the H1B programme,’’ said Mr. Musk who is also the founder of xAI, a firm which owns X (formerly Twitter).

Responding to another question of Mr. Kamath on what percentage of the internet is spent on X (Twitter) and is there a number to it, Mr. Musk said, “We have, like about 600 million monthly users. It can get up to 800 million or a billion if there’s some major event in the world.” He added, “It would be great to bring together what people say in many different languages, automatically translated, so you have the collective consciousness not just of people in a particular language group, but every language group.”

Mr Kamath had a two-hour chat with the U.S. business magnate on a wide range of topics, including X (Twitter), AI, the future of content, money energy, Starlink, friendship, tariffs, children, DOGE, immigration, philanthropy, and even whether live events are the world’s next big asset class.

Published – December 02, 2025 10:04 am IST