After a six-week work trip Xiayun, an employee at a semiconductor company in Silicon Valley, had landed at her hometown in China for vacation when she saw the news about H-1B visas. On Friday afternoon, US president Donald Trump signed a proclamation saying that any H-1B visa holder’s entry into the US will be “restricted, except for those aliens whose petitions are accompanied or supplemented by a payment of $100,000.” The news left Xiayun and hundreds of thousands of immigrant workers scrambling to figure out how they’d be impacted and whether, if they were abroad, they should return before Sunday, when the new rule was set to take effect.
Xiayun, who asked to use her online alias and not mention her employer’s name in the story to avoid being identified, claims she started receiving communications from her manager asking her to consider returning as soon as possible to avoid being charged the fee. Before she even met her family at the airport, she says she already decided to fly back to the US as soon as possible. She only stayed in Urumqi for two hours before hopping on the next flight back to California.
“I had looked forward to the opportunity of traveling with my parents for a long time, but the reality is, I can’t leave behind my husband, my cat, my house, my friends, and my job in the US,” she tells WIRED.
H-1B is one of the most common work visas, issued to skilled workers seeking temporary residence in the US as long as three years, with the possibility of renewal providing continuing employment. In 2019, the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) estimated that there were over 580,000 immigrants holding H-1B visas in the country. Silicon Valley companies are the program’s biggest users, according to data collected by USCIS on the employers who had the most H-1B visas approved every year. In Fiscal Year 2025, the top companies sponsoring for new H-1B visas included Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Apple, and Google.
By Friday evening, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon had sent urgent communications to foreign employees, according to emails reviewed by WIRED, advising them to return to the states before the Sunday deadline set in the proclamation.
Conflicting messages poured out of the White House, US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, and other government social media accounts. “Things are changing every hour, every 30 minutes,” says Steven Brown, an immigration attorney at Reddy Neumann Brown PC. Lutnick claimed the $100,000 fee would be charged annually, others said it’s a one-time charge; the original proclamation did not exempt current visa holders, but the follow-up announcements did. The contradictions and new developments left legal immigrant workers, their families, and employers unsure what to believe over the past weekend.
WIRED talked to six H-1B visa holders who made last-minute decisions to return to the US from vacation or work trips before the new policy took hold. All of them requested to be identified with only their first or last names in this story, fearing that speaking out against the administration will cause retribution. While explanations posted by the administration on Saturday afternoon clarified that most H-1B visa holders who were outside of the country at the time did not actually need to rush back, by then they claim they had already lost thousands of dollars in changing their travel plans and spent two days in emotional stress.
The scene opens confusingly. The camera zooms too close to the president’s face; the table at which the tech executives are seated seems far too long. Mark Zuckerberg is there, and Bill Gates and Tim Cook and Satya Nadella and Sam Altman and on and on, a baker’s dozen or so of Silicon Valley’s most powerful people—cutthroat competitors all—united here to pledge allegiance to Donald Trump.
The introduction from Trump is characteristically both overgilded and confusing: “It’s an honor to be here with this group of people. They’re leading a revolution in business and in genius and every other word.” And then, about 90 seconds in, the pandering begins.
This was Donald Trump’s dinner with tech leaders at the State Dining Room in the White House on Thursday evening, broadcast in part for all to see on C-SPAN. It’s in many ways a remarkable document, the culmination of months of Big Tech cozying up to the administration.
One by one, Trump asked the executives how much they were investing in the United States. One by one, they obliged, praising Trump’s leadership along the way. The president has run this play previously with his cabinet members, powerful people tripping over themselves in the race toward Trump’s good graces. But there was an eeriness to seeing that same dynamic among Big Tech’s braintrust, like passing a camera around to take turns wishing a distant, unloved uncle a very happy Thanksgiving.
“It’s going to be something like $600 billion through ’28,” said Zuckerberg about Meta’s domestic infrastructure investments. Sergey Brin congratulated Trump on “applying pressure” in Venezuela, two days after a US drone operator extrajudicially murdered 11 people on an alleged drug cartel boat.
Everyone else praised the administration’s AI policy. Microsoft’s Nadella shouted out Melania Trump in particular for her leadership in “skilling and economic opportunity that comes with AI.” (The first lady launched a Presidential Artificial Intelligence Challenge last month and hosted an education-themed AI task force meeting prior to the dinner on Thursday.) Google CEO Sundar Pichai and AMD CEO Lisa Su praised the Trump administration’s AI initiatives.
“I want to thank you for setting the tone such that we could make a major investment in the United States,” said Cook, referring to Apple’s pledge to put $600 billion into US manufacturing. Given that Apple made that commitment under threat of crippling tariffs on smartphones, it was a bit like thanking the school bully for setting the tone such that you can give him your lunch money.
For enthusiasm it was hard to beat Oracle CEO Safra Catz, who had previously served as a member of Trump’s transition team. “You’ve unleashed American innovation and creativity. All the work you’re doing in basically every cabinet post in addition to what’s coming out of the White House is making it possible for America to win,” Catz said. “I think this is the most exciting time in America ever.” And with that, after a quick joke about his rumored demise, Trump opened up the floor to questions from the media. If you watch closely, you can catch Zuckerberg giving someone across the table an eyebrow raise for the ages.
In one paper Eleos AI published, the nonprofit argues for evaluating AI consciousness using a “computational functionalism” approach. A similar idea was once championed by none other than Putnam, though he criticized it later in his career. The theory suggests that human minds can be thought of as specific kinds of computational systems. From there, you can then figure out if other computational systems, such as a chabot, have indicators of sentience similar to those of a human.
Eleos AI said in the paper that “a major challenge in applying” this approach “is that it involves significant judgment calls, both in formulating the indicators and in evaluating their presence or absence in AI systems.”
Model welfare is, of course, a nascent and still evolving field. It’s got plenty of critics, including Mustafa Suleyman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, who recently published a blog about “seemingly conscious AI.”
“This is both premature, and frankly dangerous,” Suleyman wrote, referring generally to the field of model welfare research. “All of this will exacerbate delusions, create yet more dependence-related problems, prey on our psychological vulnerabilities, introduce new dimensions of polarization, complicate existing struggles for rights, and create a huge new category error for society.”
Suleyman wrote that “there is zero evidence” today that conscious AI exists. He included a link to a paper that Long coauthored in 2023 that proposed a new framework for evaluating whether an AI system has “indicator properties” of consciousness. (Suleyman did not respond to a request for comment from WIRED.)
I chatted with Long and Campbell shortly after Suleyman published his blog. They told me that, while they agreed with much of what he said, they don’t believe model welfare research should cease to exist. Rather, they argue that the harms Suleyman referenced are the exact reasons why they want to study the topic in the first place.
“When you have a big, confusing problem or question, the one way to guarantee you’re not going to solve it is to throw your hands up and be like ‘Oh wow, this is too complicated,’” Campbell says. “I think we should at least try.”
Testing Consciousness
Model welfare researchers primarily concern themselves with questions of consciousness. If we can prove that you and I are conscious, they argue, then the same logic could be applied to large language models. To be clear, neither Long nor Campbell think that AI is conscious today, and they also aren’t sure it ever will be. But they want to develop tests that would allow us to prove it.
“The delusions are from people who are concerned with the actual question, ‘Is this AI, conscious?’ and having a scientific framework for thinking about that, I think, is just robustly good,” Long says.
But in a world where AI research can be packaged into sensational headlines and social media videos, heady philosophical questions and mind-bending experiments can easily be misconstrued. Take what happened when Anthropic published a safety report that showed Claude Opus 4 may take “harmful actions” in extreme circumstances, like blackmailing a fictional engineer to prevent it from being shut off.
Bi understood how far-fetched her allegations sounded. “If it were not for all the hard evidence, it’s too shocking to believe [Rebecca Smith] did what she did to kill my son,” Bi wrote on Facebook, using Smith’s real name. Perhaps a kind friend could have suggested to Bi that there were other explanations. Instead, Bi had a set of legal adversaries and a supportive echo chamber. On Facebook, GCs and IPs alike expressed sympathy for Bi’s tragic posts: Everyone knew bad surrogates existed, and based on Bi’s claims, it sounded like Smith was one. Aimee Eyvazzadeh, a Bay Area fertility doctor and influencer, called Smith “a criminal” and “a psycho.” Bi’s $1,275-an-hour lawyer, Elizabeth Sperling, wondered whether digging through social media posts might show Smith engaging in “strenuous activity” that could explain the death.
Bi’s husband focused on stabilizing the family, a move he credits with saving their marriage. He blamed the hospital, not Smith, but told me that the litigation is “her grieving process.” He tried to stay out of the legal stuff so that Bi couldn’t blame him too.
Smith had planned to go back to work shortly after giving birth. Instead, she couldn’t stop bleeding. Even though SAI had determined she hadn’t breached the contract, the escrow stopped paying, leaving Smith reliant on disability benefits as she faced an increasing pile of terrifying bills.
When Smith was finally cleared to return to work, a month after Leon died, Bi emailed Smith’s HR department to ask about her health plan. Bi also reported Smith to a federal agency, claiming that Smith was committing fraud. The stress on Smith was already high: Her supervisor at work had found her crying on and off for a day.
Smith hadn’t heard from Bi since her terse reply to the condolence email. Then, Bi texted her a screenshot of a Facebook post about another GC who’d had an abruption at almost 32 weeks—but that GC had called 911 and the baby had lived.
Next, Bi iMessaged a photo of Leon’s corpse to Smith’s 7-year-old son’s iPad.
In the months after Leon died, Bi:
Called the FBI 12 times. Reported Smith, SAI, the hospital, and Clarity escrow to more than a dozen state and federal regulators and numerous professional organizations. Launched a new round of her $30 million venture fund, backed by Marc Andreessen and David Sacks, President Trump’s “AI and crypto czar,” on Leon’s due date. Posted Leon’s ChatGPT-written endorsement from heaven, offering his “eternal blessings” for her work. Created TikToks, Instagram Reels, Facebook posts, X threads, LinkedIn Updates, and a website for her advocacy. Posted links disclosing Smith’s full name, photo, address, employer, mortgage license number, and son’s first name to her website. Asked her husband, again and again, how it was possible that Smith had carried her son but felt “nothing” about his death.
Baby Leon’s empty crib.
Courtesy of Cindy Bi
Bi has abandonment issues that she traces back to her twenties, when her father divorced her mom for the mistress who’d conceived his long-awaited son. She got on lithium for her bipolar disorder in early 2021 and began looking for surrogates as soon as she stopped feeling “sedated.” I spoke to the therapist Bi hired to consult with her and Valdeiglesias. She told me that, of the 792 intended parents she has evaluated for surrogacy or gamete donation in the last decade, she has declined to recommend only about a dozen. “I’m not gatekeeping,” she said. When it comes to serious mental illness, she added, it’s up to them to disclose. One of Bi’s fertility doctors, meanwhile, told me it’s not his place to scrutinize intended parents. He defers to the recommendation of the psychological interviewer.
If an intended parent gets turned down, they can usually find another therapist, another clinic, another agency. But without anyone questioning her plans, Bi seemed betrayed by the challenges of third-party reproduction. “Surrogacy is supposed to be the safest route,” she wrote on Instagram. It wasn’t just Leon’s death that pushed Bi into her spiral of legal action and social media posts. It was the apparent lack of control of having her child inside another woman’s body—the most basic fact of surrogacy.
At least three artificial intelligence researchers have resigned from Meta’s new superintelligence lab, just two months after CEO Mark Zuckerberg first announced the initiative. Two of the staffers have returned to OpenAI, where they both previously worked, after less than one-month stints at Meta, WIRED has confirmed.
Avi Verma was previously a researcher at OpenAI. Ethan Knight worked at the ChatGPT maker earlier in his career but joined Meta from Elon Musk’s xAI. A third researcher, Rishabh Agarwal, announced publicly on Monday he was leaving Meta’s lab as well. He joined the tech giant in April to work on generative AI projects before switching to a role at Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL), according to his LinkedIn profile. While the reasons for Agarwal’s departure are not known, he is based in Canada and Meta’s AI teams are predominantly based in Menlo Park, California.
“It was a tough decision not to continue with the new Superintelligence TBD lab, especially given the talent and compute density,” Agarwal wrote on X, referring to the team at MSL that is specifically pursuing frontier AI research. “But after 7.5 years across Google Brain, DeepMind, and Meta, I felt the pull to take on a different kind of risk.” It’s unclear where he may be going next. Agarwal did not respond to a request for comment from WIRED.
“During an intense recruiting process, some people will decide to stay in their current job rather than starting a new one,” said Meta spokesperson Dave Arnold. “That’s normal,”
Meta is also losing another leader who has worked at the tech giant for nearly a decade. Chaya Nayak, the director of generative AI product management at Meta, is joining OpenAI to work on special initiatives, according to two sources with direct knowledge of the hire.
Verma and Knight did not respond to a request for comment from WIRED. Nayak declined to comment in time for publication.
The departures are the strongest public signal yet that Meta Superintelligence Labs could be off to a rocky start. Zuckerberg lured people to join the lab with nine-figure pay packages associated more often with professional sports stars than tech workers, hoping the influx of talent would allow the social networking giant to rapidly catch up with its competitors in the race toward so-called artificial general intelligence.
But Meta executives have reportedly struggled to combat bureaucratic and recruitment issues related to its AI initiatives. Meta has repeatedly reorganized its AI teams in recent months, most recently splitting employees into four groups, per The Wall Street Journal.
In July, Zuckerberg announced that another former OpenAI researcher Shengjia Zhao, who played a key role in the creation of ChatGPT, would become the chief scientist of MSL. The announcement came after Zhao tried to return to OpenAI—even going as far as to sign employment paperwork—according to multiple sources with direct knowledge of the events.
“Shengjia co-founded MSL and has been our scientific lead since day one,” Arnold said in a statement to WIRED. “We formalized his role once our recruiting had ramped and the team had taken shape.”
Apple is suing Chinese consumer electronics company Oppo for poaching a member of the Cupertino giant’s Apple Watch team to allegedly steal trade secrets.
Apple, represented by lawyers from Kirkland & Ellis, is bringing the lawsuit against the company’s former sensor system architect Dr. Cheng Shi, and his new employers China-based Oppo and California-based Innopeak.
Dr. Shi now leads a team developing sensing technology at Oppo’s U.S. office, according to a complaint filed by Apple on Thursday in the Northern District of California.
What is Shi accused of doing?
Dr. Shi was a highly paid engineer at Apple between January 2020 and June 2025 where Apple says he had “a front row seat to Apple’s development of its cutting-edge health sensor technology, including highly confidential roadmaps, design and development documents, and specifications for ECG sensor technology,” which helps Apple Watches measure heart activity, according to the complaint.
Apple accuses Dr. Shi of downloading 63 confidential documents on the company’s shared drive for employees to a USB drive just three days before leaving. The documents allegedly included sensitive information on the technological capabilities of yet to be released products and “technical specifications concerning hardware and software implementations” of Apple’s sensor products like temperature sensors in its Apple Watch offerings.
Before downloading the documents from Apple’s shared drive onto his Macbook, Dr. Shi’s internet search history allegedly revealed that he looked up “how to wipe out macbook” and “Can somebody see if I’ve opened a file on a shared drive?”
Apple also claims that Dr. Shi stole confidential technical information from the team that is developing Apple’s custom chips. Apple develops its own custom silicon chips for its Mac, iPhone, and iPad products. The company has also been working on designing custom AI chips for some time now, and the effort is considered key to CEO Tim Cook’s AI overhaul.
Oppo’s smartphones, although ano match yet to Apple’s iPhones, do remarkably well in Asian markets, particularly in China, one of Apple’s largest markets.
Along with Huawei and Xiaomi, Oppo has eaten away at Apple’s China market share, causing Apple to fall off from the list of top five smartphone vendors in China in 2024. But the tech giant has recently started turning this narrative around: iPhone sales rose to the top spot in China in May, Reuters reported in June citing preliminary third-party data, driving an overall increase in global sales for Apple.
Although Oppo does not do business in the U.S., the company does own and operate a “research center” in Silicon Valley under both Oppo and Innopeak’s names, according to the complaint.
Oppo has not yet responded to Gizmodo’s request for comment.
What does Apple say happened?
Apple points to evidence from Dr. Shi’s work-issued phone, which allegedly shows his communications with Oppo senior leadership from April 2025 to until he left Apple at the end of June.
“This week I’ll inform my team about my resignation,” he allegedly wrote in messages included in the lawsuit. “Lately, I’ve also been reviewing various internal materials and doing a lot of 1:1 meetings in an effort to collect as much information as possible – will share with you all later.”
In the month before he left Apple, Dr. Shi allegedly scheduled 33 one-on-one meetings covering projects he was not involved in, compared to an average of seven per month a year earlier.
Then when he did resign at the end of the month, Dr. Shi did not tell colleagues that he would begin work at Oppo, but instead said that he was “returning to China to tend to his elderly parents and had no plans to seek new employment,” according to the complaint.
Apple is seeking an injunction prohibiting Oppo from using Apple’s trade secrets, and is asking the court to award restitution and damages in an amount to be determined at trial.
President Donald Trump on Friday announced the U.S. government has secured a 10% stake in struggling Silicon Valley pioneer Intel in a deal that was completed just a couple weeks after he was depicting the company’s CEO as a conflicted leader unfit for the job.“The United States of America now fully owns and controls 10% of INTEL, a Great American Company that has an even more incredible future,” Trump wrote in a post.The U.S. government is getting the stake through the conversion of $11.1 billion in previously issued funds and pledges. All told, the government is getting 433.3 million shares of non-voting stock priced at $20.47 apiece — a discount from Friday’s closing price at $24.80. That spread means the U.S. government already has a gain of $1.9 billion, on paper.The remarkable turn of events makes the U.S. government one of Intel’s largest shareholders at a time that the Santa Clara, California, company is i n the process of jettisoning more than 20,000 workers as part of its latest attempt to bounce back from years of missteps taken under a variety of CEOs.Intel’s current CEO, Lip-Bu Tan, has only been on the job for slightly more than five months, and earlier this month, it looked like he might be on shaky ground already after some lawmakers raised national security concerns about his past investments in Chinese companies while he was a venture capitalist. Trump latched on to those concerns in an August 7 post demanding that Tan resign.But Trump backed off after the Malaysian-born Tan professed his allegiance to the U.S. in a public letter to Intel employees and went to the White House to meet with the president, leading to a deal that now has the U.S. government betting that the company is on the comeback trail after losing more than $22 billion since the end of 2023. Trump hailed Tan as “highly respected” CEO in his Friday post.In a statement, Tan applauded Trump for “driving historic investments in a vital industry” and resolved to reward his faith in Intel. “We are grateful for the confidence the President and the Administration have placed in Intel, and we look forward to working to advance U.S. technology and manufacturing leadership,” Tan said.Intel’s current stock price is just slightly above where it was when Tan was hired in March and more than 60% below its peak of about $75 reached 25 years ago when its chips were still dominating the personal computer boom before being undercut by a shift to smartphones a few years later. The company’s market value currently stands at about $108 billion – a fraction of the current chip kingpin, Nvidia, which is valued at $4.3 trillion.The stake is coming primarily through U.S. government grants to Intel through the CHIPS and Science Act that was started under President Joe Biden’s administration as a way to foster more domestic manufacturing of computer chips to lessen the dependence on overseas factories.But the Trump administration, which has regularly pilloried the policies of the Biden administration, saw the CHIPs act as a needless giveaway and is now hoping to make a profit off the funding that had been pledged to Intel.”We think America should get the benefit of the bargain,” U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said earlier this week. “It’s obvious that it’s the right move to make.”About $7.8 billion had been been pledged to Intel under the incentives program, but only $2.2 billion had been funded so far. Another $3.2 billion of the government investment is coming through the funds from another program called “Secure Enclave.”Although U.S. government can’t vote with its shares and won’t have a seat on Intel’s board of directors, critics of the deal view it as a troubling cross-pollination between the public and private sectors that could hurt the tech industry in a variety of ways.For instance, more tech companies may feel pressured to buy potentially inferior chips from Intel to curry favor with Trump at a time that he is already waging a trade war that threatens to affect their products in a potential scenario cited by Scott Lincicome, vice president of general economics for the Cato Institute.“Overall, it’s a horrendous move that will have real harms for U.S. companies, U.S. tech leadership, and the U.S. economy overall,” Lincicome posted Friday.The 10% stake could also intensify the pressure already facing Tan, especially if Trump starts fixating on Intel’s stock price while resorting to his penchant for celebrating his past successes in business.Nancy Tengler, CEO of money manager Laffer Tengler Investments, is among the investors who abandoned Intel years ago because of all the challenges facing Intel.“I don’t see the benefit to the American taxpayer, nor do I see the benefit, necessarily to the chip industry,” Tengler said while also raising worries about Trump meddling in Intel’s business.“I don’t care how good of businessman you are, give it to the private sector and let people like me be the critic and let the government get to the business of government.,” Tengler said.Although rare, it’s not unprecedented for the U.S. government to become a significant shareholder in a prominent company. One of the most notable instances occurred during the Great Recession in 2008 when the government injected nearly $50 billion into General Motors in return for a roughly 60% stake in the automaker at a time it was on the verge of bankruptcy. The government ended up with a roughly $10 billion loss after it sold its stock in GM.The U.S. government’s stake in Intel coincides with Trump’s push to bring production to the U.S., which has been a focal point of the trade war that he has been waging throughout the world. By lessening the country’s dependence on chips manufactured overseas, the president believes the U.S. will be better positioned to maintain its technological lead on China in the race to create artificial intelligence.Even before gaining the 10% stake in Intel, Trump had been leveraging his power to reprogram the operations of major computer chip companies. The administration is requiring Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices, two companies whose chips are powering the AI craze, to pay a 15% commission on their sales of chips in China in exchange for export licenses.
President Donald Trump on Friday announced the U.S. government has secured a 10% stake in struggling Silicon Valley pioneer Intel in a deal that was completed just a couple weeks after he was depicting the company’s CEO as a conflicted leader unfit for the job.
“The United States of America now fully owns and controls 10% of INTEL, a Great American Company that has an even more incredible future,” Trump wrote in a post.
The U.S. government is getting the stake through the conversion of $11.1 billion in previously issued funds and pledges. All told, the government is getting 433.3 million shares of non-voting stock priced at $20.47 apiece — a discount from Friday’s closing price at $24.80. That spread means the U.S. government already has a gain of $1.9 billion, on paper.
The remarkable turn of events makes the U.S. government one of Intel’s largest shareholders at a time that the Santa Clara, California, company is i n the process of jettisoning more than 20,000 workers as part of its latest attempt to bounce back from years of missteps taken under a variety of CEOs.
Intel’s current CEO, Lip-Bu Tan, has only been on the job for slightly more than five months, and earlier this month, it looked like he might be on shaky ground already after some lawmakers raised national security concerns about his past investments in Chinese companies while he was a venture capitalist. Trump latched on to those concerns in an August 7 postdemanding that Tan resign.
But Trump backed off after the Malaysian-born Tan professed his allegiance to the U.S. in a public letter to Intel employees and went to the White House to meet with the president, leading to a deal that now has the U.S. government betting that the company is on the comeback trail after losing more than $22 billion since the end of 2023. Trump hailed Tan as “highly respected” CEO in his Friday post.
In a statement, Tan applauded Trump for “driving historic investments in a vital industry” and resolved to reward his faith in Intel. “We are grateful for the confidence the President and the Administration have placed in Intel, and we look forward to working to advance U.S. technology and manufacturing leadership,” Tan said.
Intel’s current stock price is just slightly above where it was when Tan was hired in March and more than 60% below its peak of about $75 reached 25 years ago when its chips were still dominating the personal computer boom before being undercut by a shift to smartphones a few years later. The company’s market value currently stands at about $108 billion – a fraction of the current chip kingpin, Nvidia, which is valued at $4.3 trillion.
The stake is coming primarily through U.S. government grants to Intel through the CHIPS and Science Act that was started under President Joe Biden’s administration as a way to foster more domestic manufacturing of computer chips to lessen the dependence on overseas factories.
But the Trump administration, which has regularly pilloried the policies of the Biden administration, saw the CHIPs act as a needless giveaway and is now hoping to make a profit off the funding that had been pledged to Intel.
“We think America should get the benefit of the bargain,” U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said earlier this week. “It’s obvious that it’s the right move to make.”
About $7.8 billion had been been pledged to Intel under the incentives program, but only $2.2 billion had been funded so far. Another $3.2 billion of the government investment is coming through the funds from another program called “Secure Enclave.”
Although U.S. government can’t vote with its shares and won’t have a seat on Intel’s board of directors, critics of the deal view it as a troubling cross-pollination between the public and private sectors that could hurt the tech industry in a variety of ways.
For instance, more tech companies may feel pressured to buy potentially inferior chips from Intel to curry favor with Trump at a time that he is already waging a trade war that threatens to affect their products in a potential scenario cited by Scott Lincicome, vice president of general economics for the Cato Institute.
“Overall, it’s a horrendous move that will have real harms for U.S. companies, U.S. tech leadership, and the U.S. economy overall,” Lincicome posted Friday.
The 10% stake could also intensify the pressure already facing Tan, especially if Trump starts fixating on Intel’s stock price while resorting to his penchant for celebrating his past successes in business.
Nancy Tengler, CEO of money manager Laffer Tengler Investments, is among the investors who abandoned Intel years ago because of all the challenges facing Intel.
“I don’t see the benefit to the American taxpayer, nor do I see the benefit, necessarily to the chip industry,” Tengler said while also raising worries about Trump meddling in Intel’s business.
“I don’t care how good of businessman you are, give it to the private sector and let people like me be the critic and let the government get to the business of government.,” Tengler said.
Although rare, it’s not unprecedented for the U.S. government to become a significant shareholder in a prominent company. One of the most notable instances occurred during the Great Recession in 2008 when the government injected nearly $50 billion into General Motors in return for a roughly 60% stake in the automaker at a time it was on the verge of bankruptcy. The government ended up with a roughly $10 billion loss after it sold its stock in GM.
The U.S. government’s stake in Intel coincides with Trump’s push to bring production to the U.S., which has been a focal point of the trade war that he has been waging throughout the world. By lessening the country’s dependence on chips manufactured overseas, the president believes the U.S. will be better positioned to maintain its technological lead on China in the race to create artificial intelligence.
Even before gaining the 10% stake in Intel, Trump had been leveraging his power to reprogram the operations of major computer chip companies. The administration is requiring Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices, two companies whose chips are powering the AI craze, to pay a 15% commission on their sales of chips in China in exchange for export licenses.
President Trump said that Intel has agreed to give the U.S. government a 10% stake in its business.
Speaking with reporters on Friday, Mr. Trump said the deal came out of a meeting last week with Intel CEO Lip Bu Tan — which came days after the president called for Tan to resign over his past ties to China.
“I said, I think it would be good having the United States as your partner,” Mr. Trump said. “He agreed, and they’ve agreed to do it.”
In a social media post Friday afternoon, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick indicated that the deal had been finalized, but did not elaborate.
“The United States of America now owns 10% of Intel, one of our great American technology companies,” Lutnick wrote. “This historic agreement strengthens U.S. leadership in semiconductors, which will both grow our economy and help secure America’s technological edge.”
Lutnick also thanked Tan “for striking a deal that’s fair to Intel and fair to the American People.”
The struggling Silicon Valley chipmaker has a market cap of just over $100 billion. The agreement comes just after Japanese technology giant SoftBank Group disclosed Monday that it is accumulating its 2% stake in Intel.
The Trump administration has been in talks to secure a 10% stake in Intel in exchange for converting government grants that were pledged to Intel under former President Joe Biden. With a 10% stake, the U.S. government would become one of Intel’s largest shareholders and blur the traditional lines separating the public sector and private sector in a country that remains the world’s largest economy.
Intel confirmed the deal in a news release Friday evening which stated that the U.S. government would “make an $8.9 billion investment in Intel common stock, reflecting the confidence the Administration has in Intel to advance key national priorities and the critically important role the company plays in expanding the domestic semiconductor industry.”
Intel said the government’s equity stake would be “funded by the remaining $5.7 billion in grants previously awarded, but not yet paid, to Intel under the U.S. CHIPS and Science Act and $3.2 billion awarded to the company as part of the Secure Enclave program.”
Intel said that under the terms of the deal, the government agreed to purchase 433.3 million primary shares of Intel stock, valued at $20.47 per share, or the equivalent of a 9.9% stake in the company.
In a Truth Social post early Friday evening, Mr. Trump wrote that it was his “Great Honor to report that the United States of America now fully owns and controls 10% of INTEL.”
Trump added that the U.S. “paid nothing for these Shares, and the Shares are now valued at approximately $11 Billion Dollars.”
Why did Trump want this deal?
In his second term, Mr. Trump has been leveraging his power to reprogram the operations of major computer chip companies. The administration is requiring Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices, two companies whose chips are helping to power the craze around artificial intelligence, to pay a 15% commission on their sales of chips in China in exchange for export licenses.
Mr. Trump’s interest in Intel is also being driven by his desire to boost chip production in the U.S., which has been a focal point of the trade war that he has been waging throughout the world. By lessening the country’s dependence on chips manufactured overseas, the president believes the U.S. will be better positioned to maintain its technological lead on China in the race to create artificial intelligence.
Earlier this month, the president called on Tan to resign less than five months after the Santa Clara, California, company had hired him. The demand was triggered by reports raising national security concerns about Tan’s past investments in Chinese tech companies while he was a venture capitalist.
But Mr. Trump backed off after Tan professed his allegiance to the U.S. in a public letter to Intel employees and went to the White House to meet with the president, who applauded the Intel CEO for having an “amazing story.”
After enjoying decades of growth while its processors powered the personal computer boom, the company fell into a slump after missing the shift to the mobile computing era unleashed by the iPhone’s 2007 debut.
Intel has fallen even farther behind in recent years during an artificial intelligence craze that has been a boon for Nvidia and AMD. The company lost nearly $19 billion last year and another $3.7 billion in the first six months of this year, prompting Tan to undertake a cost-cutting spree. By the end of this year, Tan expects Intel to have about 75,000 workers, a 25% reduction from the end of last year.
Has the U.S. government done something like this before?
Although rare, it’s not unprecedented for the U.S. government to become a significant shareholder in a prominent company. One of the most notable instances occurred during the Great Recession in 2008 when the government injected nearly $50 billion into General Motors in return for a roughly 60% stake in the automaker at a time it was on the verge of bankruptcy. The government ended up with a roughly $10 billion loss after it sold its stock in GM.
Lutnick told CNBC during a Tuesday interview that the government has no intention of meddling in Intel’s business, and will have its hands tied by holding non-voting shares in the company. But some analysts wonder if the Trump administration’s financial ties to Intel might prod more companies looking to curry favor with the president to increase their orders for the company’s chips.
But some analysts wonder if the Trump administration’s financial ties to Intel might prod more companies looking to curry favor with the president to increase their orders for the company’s chips.
What federal grants does Intel receive?
Intel was among the biggest beneficiaries of the Biden administration’s CHIPS and Science Act, but it hasn’t been able to revive its fortunes while falling behind on construction projects spawned by the program.
The company has received about $2.2 billion of the $7.8 billion pledged under the incentives program.
Six years after Silicon Valley ended its HBO run, at least one tech billionaire is probably happy it’s gone.
Kumail Nanjiani, who starred as programmer Dinesh Chugtai on the comedy series parodying the tech industry, recalled meeting Elon Musk and hearing his critique of the series from Mike Judge, John Altschuler and Dave Krinsky.
“He didn’t like the show,” Nanjiani said on the Mike Birbiglia’s Working It Out podcast. “He was like, all the parties I go to are much cooler than these parties. I was like, yeah man, you’re one of the richest people in the world. We’re, like, losers on the show. Of course your parties are better than my parties.”
Running for six seasons from 2014 to 2019, Silicon Valley stars Thomas Middleditch as programmer Richard Hendricks, inspired by Judge’s experience working in the tech industry of the ’80s. The series took place in present day Silicon Valley, starring TJ Miller, Josh Brener, Martin Starr, Zach Woods and Nanjiani as the employees of Richard’s tech startup Pied Piper.
At a Deadline panel in 2020, Nanjiani said, “Our show came out at the perfect time… when we did the pilot, people weren’t as fascinated with Silicon Valley personalities. We didn’t know a lot of the names back then. While the show was airing, people have become very aware of the people who are running Silicon Valley and how the tech has affected our lives in a negative way.”
‘Silicon Valley’
HBO
Musk has long been a major figure in Silicon Valley with stakes in Tesla, SpaceX and X, among other tech ventures. He’s also been an outspoken comedy critic in recent years.
Four years ago, one of Vice President Kamala Harris’ top donors—the billionaire cofounder of LinkedIn Reid Hoffman—celebrated the IPO of Airbnb, a company he was heavily invested in, by fashioning Monopoly boards where the game’s “jail” space is replaced by “government regulation.”
Since Harris became the Democratic presidential nominee, many billionaire tech investors have come out of the woodwork to support her campaign. While they often tout Harris as a business-friendly politician, they’ve been vocal in their dislike of Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan’s antitrust agenda. Hoffman is one of the most influential donors in that group. He has donated tens of millions of dollars in support of the Biden and Harris campaigns and has organized other wealthy tech investors to do so as well.
When Airbnb went public in December 2020, the company was valued at more than $47 billion. Hoffman sent at least a handful of other investors a board game styled after Monopoly called “Airbnopoly,” according to images of the game obtained by WIRED. A top Airbnb investor confirmed that he was one of several people who received the game from Hoffman and his venture firm Greylock Partners.
The box is labeled as “a Reid Hoffman and Greylock production,” and it contains all of the pieces typically included in the classic board game, like cards, dice, and game pieces—all with a travel theme. Instead of a top hat or a thimble, players can navigate the board with an airplane seat, golf club, flip flops, and so on. The spaces on the board are customized, too, to include airports instead of railroads and Airbnb locations rather than Atlantic City streets. In one telling modification, instead of a “Go to Jail” space, the board tells players to go back to a “Government Regulation” corner space. If players avoid government regulation, they move across a path titled “Progress.”
Some spaces on the board require the players to pay government-issued fines, taxes, or trust and safety fees. “Recent developments in American politics make you curious about living in Canada,” reads one of the game’s cards.
Airbnbopoly is clearly more of a novelty gift than a screed against big government. “Reid is a huge lover of board games, having played Settlers of Catan, et cetera, for many, many years, so he made a custom board game called Settlers of Silicon Valley and gifted it to many friends,” says Aria Finger, podcast cohost and chief of staff for Hoffman told WIRED. “Then for Airbnb he thought a custom game would be a nice, unique gesture, and the Monopoly board easily lent itself to Airbnb’s various rentals, so he decided on that.”
Still, it has become public at a time when Hoffman and his Silicon Valley contemporaries have called for Khan to be fired under a possible Harris administration.
Since Khan was confirmed as chair in 2021, the FTC has gone after tech giants like Amazon, Google, and Meta for possible anticompetitive behavior. Many of these lawsuits have failed, while others are ongoing. Khan’s biggest win came in August when a judge found that Google had maintained an illegal monopoly in the online search market.
In 2016, Hoffman sold LinkedIn to Microsoft, and he sits on the company’s board. Microsoft is reportedly currently under FTC investigation as part of a probe into collaborations and investments in artificial intelligence. A spokesperson for Hoffman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Trump’s relationship with Apple CEO Tim Cook is one of the most congenial the former president has shared with a Silicon Valley leader. Cook maintained a relationship with Trump during his time in office, often meeting with the president and serving on advisory panels influencing policy decisions that affect Apple’s business, such as tariffs and immigration.
Cook has not publicly confirmed that this most recent call took place. Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment from WIRED.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg
Shortly after the assassination attempt against Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, this summer, the former president claimed that Zuckerberg called him. In an interview with New York magazine, Trump claimed that Zuckerberg said, “‘I will never vote for people running against you after watching what you did.’”
While Meta wouldn’t detail the contents of the call, Zuckerberg confirmed he had called Trump after the assassination attempt, calling the former president “bad ass” in July.
“Seeing Donald Trump get up after getting shot in the face and pump his fist in the air with the American flag is one of the most badass things I’ve ever seen in my life,” Zuckerberg said.
Under Trump, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg sustained countless attacks from the Trump administration and conservative lawmakers over censorship allegations. In 2020, Zuckerberg donated $350 million in pandemic support to election departments around the country. Republicans accused these “Zuckerbucks” donations of being unfairly distributed to Democratic districts. In 2021, following the January 6 riot at the Capitol, Trump was banned from Facebook and Instagram.
Blue Origin CEO and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos
Former Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has been under fire in recent days after he decided that the Washington Post would no longer endorse presidential candidates, despite the paper having a Harris endorsement in the works.
Trump has long criticized Bezos for his ownership of the Washington Post, but Trump said that Bezos had called him after this summer’s assassination attempt. “It is the most incredible thing I’ve ever watched,” Trump said Bezos told him. “I said, ‘Despite the fact you own the Washington Post, I appreciate it.” Amazon’s CEO, Andy Jassy, reportedly called Trump after the July shooting as well.
Eric Lander is a Big Science heavyweight. A geneticist, molecular biologist, and mathematician, he led the International Human Genome Project and is founding director of the powerful Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. His countless accolades include a MacArthur “genius” grant and 14 honorary doctorates. When Joe Biden became president, he tapped Lander to be his science adviser and the head of the Office of Science and Technology Policy. Lander lost the job because of charges that he bullied subordinates, but he went on to head a nonprofit organization called Science for America.
So what is he doing running a Silicon Valley startup that aims to solve the climate crisis by realizing the long-held dream of clean fusion energy? Lander is the founding CEO of newly announced Pacific Fusion, heading a team that includes top scientists from the national nuclear labs—Lawrence Livermore and Sandia—as well as experts in simulation and operations. It joins several dozen companies chasing a fusion dream that always seems to be 10 or 20 years out. And it still is—Pacific Fusion says it won’t deliver a working commercial fusion plant until well into the 2030s. But this time there’s a clear path to success. Or so says its famous CEO.
In May 2023, Science for America issued a report that flagged progress in fusion, citing recent breakthroughs. The year before, a Livermore group achieved what is known as “target gain,” producing significantly more energy than the amount required to perform the experiment. Soon after publishing the paper, Lander quietly formed a company with some scientists in the field, including some who worked at the labs and others from places like Alphabet’s X division and Tesla.
Sitting in a conference room at Pacific Fusion’s headquarters in Fremont, California, Lander explains to me why commercial fusion is finally within reach—and why Pacific Fusion may have the best chance to make it happen. He starts by giving me a primer on fusion, which happens when hydrogen is, in his word, “squished” into helium, releasing massive amounts of energy. It occurs naturally on the sun and other stars, but humans have yet to figure out how to do it efficiently here on Earth. But the potential payoff—unlimited clean power—has prompted around 50 startups to chase this dragon. Billionaires including Sam Altman and Bill Gates have backed one or another of these startups. Every few months, it seems, one of those contenders announces some breakthrough.
Why does Pacific Fusion say it’s different? The method it’s pursuing is called pulsed magnetic fusion, which involves inserting tiny containers of deuterium-tritium fuel into a chamber and blasting large electrical pulses through them to magnetically squeeze the fuel containers and achieve fusion. (It’s all explained here in a paper.) “It’s a very attractive approach that’s sort of been known for decades as an idea but has only just become feasible in the last two years because of this work in the national labs,” says Lander. His contention, which I will hear repeatedly as I meet with his team, is that we’ve now made all the scientific breakthroughs we need to understand how to use this technique to generate way more energy that it takes to build and run this system. The remaining challenges—hard ones to be sure— lie in engineering.
Another challenge is getting the money to build the prototypes for the hundreds of commercial plants that will theoretically solve the world’s energy woes. (And maybe cause global disruption when the current suppliers are upended, but that’s another story.) How do you fund a moonshot? Even when an investor accepts the risk, the prospect for payoff is distant: The Pacific Fusion timeline is to have a full-scale demonstration system sometime in the early 2030s, and commercial systems later in the decade.
Wells Fargo’s Innovation Center in Menlo Park, Calif., is hosting meetings with partners and venture capital firms after opening in May. “We are using this space to uncover new ways to collaborate internally, with customers, and partners, using skills across areas like research, emerging technology, product, strategy and operations to create solutions for our clients,” […]
While the biometric-scanning Orb and the World network have their roots in crypto tokens, “crypto” wasn’t an oft-mentioned word during the event. Instead, Altman and Blania emphasized World’s blockchain service, digital asset management, and virtual communication tools.
Blania claimed during the press briefing that, in the future, World hopes to build the “largest finance network” on the planet.
In a separate interview with WIRED, Blania said that during regular Sunday meetings at Atlman’s house, the pair were inspired by the rise of PayPal. Similar to the way that Peter Thiel, Max Levchin, and others once pioneered digital payments and fundamentally changed online commerce—becoming billionaires themselves in the process—the World team saw themselves building out a similar network for tokens on a distributed network.
The World app, for now, is free for everyone to use. It’s free to scan your eyeballs, too. Tools for Humanity itself is venture-backed, and the foundation, in its land grab for the modern identity verification market and your personal biometric data, is focused on scale, scale, scale. Eventually, it may make money through processing fees, Blania said.
Most of Tools for Humanity’s expansion plans for now are in locations outside of the US, due to murky regulations around crypto stateside, the organization’s spokesperson told me.
If you use the Orb and compatible app in the US, it will scan and store your iris but won’t generate a crypto token for you.
Two and a half years ago, the Worldcoin project came under scrutiny for allegedly deceptive and exploitative practices in recruiting individuals to scan their irises. At the time, Blania attributed this haphazard behavior to the organization still being in its “startup” phase. In an interview with WIRED, Blania said the company is doing “like, a thousand things” to ensure a more rigorous consent process. This includes staffing an “operational team” in every market where World will be. He said there will be “explanations” in the World app for how the product works.
“And again, there is no data stored in any central place or anything,” Blania said.
In 2023, the service was also being investigated by governments in Germany, Brazil, India, South Korea, and Kenya over concerns about how it was storing and using biometric data. Kenya suspended Worldcoin enrollment entirely. South Korea fined the company. Worldcoin suspended its own service in India, Brazil, and France.
Blania said he believes World will relaunch in Kenya “sometime soon.”
When asked in the press briefing about the emphasis on Latin America as a market for expansion, such as through the partnership with Rappi for orbs-on-delivery, Blania disputed the idea that World was prioritizing Latin America over other locations.
“It’s just that we have limited resources, and there’s a natural sequencing happening,” Blania said. “We are similarly focused on Asia and other places. Argentina has been a fast-growing market for us, for example, and we’re excited about that.”
“But the project is literally called World,” he added.
After the keynote, Altman ran into the press room to wave and apologize for not being able to stay, then slipped away like a head of state.
The world’s richest man stood steps away from the US-Mexico border, adjusting the brim of his black cowboy hat.
“As an immigrant to the United States, I am extremely pro-immigrant,” Elon Musk said, “and I believe that we need a greatly expanded legal immigration system, and that we should let anyone in the country who is hardworking and honest and will be a contributor to the United States.”
But in the September 2023 video from Eagle Pass, Texas, Musk said limits are needed, too.
“By the same token, we should also not be allowing people in the country if they’re breaking the law,” he said. “That doesn’t make sense. The law’s there for a reason.”
Since that border visit a year ago, Musk’s critiques of illegal immigration have become a prominent part of his online presence. And he’s an increasingly powerful force shaping and amplifying conversations around the issue — especially since his 2022 takeover of Twitter, now known as X, and given his huge audience on the platform.
Immigration is a top topic on voters’ minds heading into the 2024 presidential election, and it was a major focal point of the August 12 conversation Musk hosted on X with former President Donald Trump.
The tech magnate’s more than 195 million followers on X frequently see him sharing posts endorsing conspiracy theories that claim the Biden administration has deliberately allowed undocumented immigrants to cross the border to gain political advantage. It’s also common to see posts referring to his own background as an immigrant and advocating for increased legal immigration to the US.
But it’s far less common to hear Musk talking about a chapter of his family’s immigration story that’s been described by his younger brother in several interviews — an anecdote that raises questions about the billionaire tech tycoon’s own immigration status when he was starting his first company in the United States.
Kimbal Musk: ‘We were illegal immigrants’
Elon Musk, 53, was born in Pretoria, South Africa, and moved to Canada shortly before his 18th birthday, acquiring citizenship there through his mother, a Canadian citizen. According to numerous biographies and profiles of him published in recent years, he had an enterprising spirit from a young age and his sights set on immigrating to the United States.
It’s been more than three decades since Musk came to the US in 1992 for his junior year as a transfer student at the University of Pennsylvania. Since then, he’s founded several high-profile Silicon Valley startups. And today he’s the CEO of Tesla Motors, the CEO of SpaceX and the chairman and chief technology officer of X. Forbes estimates his net worth at nearly $270 billion, placing him atop the magazine’s real-time billionaires list.
But his first company’s origins were humble.
He’s described its early days in numerous speeches and interviews — as has his younger brother, Kimbal Musk, a cofounder of the startup that set them both on a path to success in the United States.
In 1995, Musk moved to Palo Alto, California, where he planned to begin a Ph.D. program at Stanford. But shortly after the school year started, according to Walter Isaacson’s 2023 biography, Musk decided he’d rather capitalize on the emerging dotcom market and focus on founding a company with Kimbal.
During 2013 remarks at the Milken Institute Global Conference, an annual gathering of business executives and thought leaders, the brothers described details they’ve often shared about how they kept living expenses low by eating at Jack in the Box — and by living at their office.
“It was cheaper to rent the office than to rent an apartment. So we just rented the office, and slept in the office, and showered at the YMCA,” Elon Musk recalled, drawing laughs from the crowd.
At the 2013 event, the brothers also touched on a topic they’ve discussed less frequently in public: their immigration status during the company’s founding.
In early 1996, their startup, an early online city guide and mapping tool, got a $3 million infusion from venture capitalists. The investors soon found themselves surprised, according to Kimbal Musk’s account captured in a video of the 2013 event posted on the Milken Institute’s YouTube page.
“When they did fund us,” Kimbal Musk recalled, “they realized that we were illegal immigrants.”
“Well…” Elon Musk interjected.
“Yes, we were,” Kimbal Musk pushed back.
Video of the remarks shows Elon Musk laughing as he jumped in with a different interpretation: “I’d say it was a gray area.”
He didn’t elaborate, and it’s unclear what Elon Musk meant by that characterization. The Musk brothers haven’t responded to CNN’s requests for comment on the exchange, nor to reports earlier this year quoting it on the tech website Gizmodo and in The Los Angeles Times.
Other accounts they’ve shared in public, and descriptions in biographies of the billionaire entrepreneur, don’t specify what kind of visas they had when founding the company or at later points — key details that would reveal what requirements they would have needed to meet to maintain a legal status in the US.
Two biographies of Musk, Isaacson’s eponymous tome and Ashlee Vance’s 2015 “Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX and the Quest for a Fantastic Future,” state that investors in the startup went on to help both brothers obtain visas.
It’s unclear what kind of visa Elon Musk had when the brothers and their friend Greg Kouri started the company eventually dubbed Zip2, and what path he went on to take to become a legal resident and citizen of the United States.
How experts interpret Elon Musk’s ‘gray area’ description
According to Isaacson’s biography and an Esquire magazine profile of Musk, he became a US citizen in 2002 — 10 years after he arrived in the country — in a ceremony at the Los Angeles County fairgrounds.
But exactly what steps he took to reach that point after his years as a student are unclear.
In response to questions from CNN, US Citizenship and Immigration Services says the agency can’t “share, confirm, or deny immigration information about specific individuals” due to privacy considerations.
Elon Musk has not responded to CNN’s questions about his immigration journey, but he’s referenced it in multiple online posts.
But why did he describe his prior immigration status as a “gray area” back in 2013?
A 2016 Snopes article found “little evidence that he was ever in the U.S. without documentation,” citing previous articles about the tech tycoon and a 2007 PBS interview where he described himself as a legal immigrant.
But immigration experts who spoke with CNN said the way Elon Musk responded when the issue was brought up publicly in 2013 suggests another possibility.
“Actually, there are no gray areas in immigration,” says Charles Kuck, an Atlanta immigration attorney. Instead, Kuck says, there are people who get caught for violations, and people who don’t.
Jennifer Minear, an immigration attorney who focuses on employment issues, points out that given that Musk is now a US citizen, “obviously he did something to regularize his status.”
“But that doesn’t mean that there wasn’t a period of time that he was without (legal) status. … It sounds like there was a little bit of wonkiness in his past with immigration,” says Minear, a past president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association.
That’s not uncommon, Kuck says.
“Our immigration laws are so strict that, regardless of how perfect you try to be, many people would find themselves in this same gray area, in the context of, you probably did something that would make you deportable at some point during your immigration journey,” he says.
That assessment, he says, is based on the law at the time and the law today.
“I will tell you, as somebody who’s done immigration law for 35 years, that a lot of immigrants leave their immigration history behind, right? They want to move on to their new life,” Kuck says. “But when you speak out against other people’s immigration journey, then yours becomes subject to scrutiny. … If you live in a glass house, you shouldn’t throw stones.”
Student visas come with strict requirements about work
The 2013 Milken Institute event isn’t the only time the brothers’ early immigration status in the US has come up.
“America forces you to be illegal if you want to start a company as an immigrant. I know. That’s how I did it,” Kimbal Musk wrote on Twitter, now X, in 2017.
In addition to that post, the younger Musk, who’s now a SpaceX and Tesla board member and also an entrepreneur behind a number of restaurants and food-related ventures, also brought up the issue during a 2020 appearance on Third Row Tesla, a podcast created by fans of the electric vehicle company.
In the interview, Kimbal Musk again recalled the early days of their startup.
“I don’t know if you were, but I was not legally in America. So I was illegally there,” he said, looking across the table at his brother.
“I was legally there,” Elon Musk responded, “but I was meant to be doing student work.”
A few moments later, describing early conversations with the venture capitalists who helped fund Zip2, Kimbal Musk reiterated details he’d shared in his 2013 remarks: “We had to break the news to them that … we don’t have a car, and we don’t have an apartment, and we are illegal.”
This time, Elon Musk denied the description applied to him.
“You’re illegal,” he said, eliciting laughs from the Tesla fans sitting beside him. “I was legal, but my visa was going to run out in two years.”
During the interview, Elon Musk said that at the time he had a “student work visa.” He also noted that he had decided to defer his Stanford enrollment that year “a couple days into the semester.”
The Musk brothers haven’t responded to CNN’s requests for comment on this exchange either.
Experts who spoke with CNN say these descriptions of what occurred also raise questions about what kind of work authorization Elon Musk had and which institution helped him get it. The description “student work visa” could be referring to various programs, they said, but it’s not an official term. Student visas are generally strict about how much off-campus work is permitted, and that work authorization is directly tied to the academic institution where a student is enrolled.
The complexities are something today’s international students, and the administrators who advise them, follow closely, according to Hunter Swanson, associate director of the Center for International Education at Washington and Lee University in Virginia.
A work permit for optional practical training connected to a student’s areas of academic focus can be granted after graduation, or possibly before graduation if the student is maintaining a full course of study. It’s also possible during an academic program to get permission to work for course credit. Grace periods after graduation allow someone to stay in the United States for a period of time, but no work is allowed in that window.
A foreign student failing to follow these rules today runs the risk of jeopardizing their future in the United States, Swanson says.
“Most international students are very conscientious. They ask people in my position a lot of questions before they do things like accept a job…or even an unpaid internship,” he says. “They’re scared to death of losing their visa status.”
Swanson, who also helps with training as an e-learning dean for an association that represents international educators, says it’s likely regulations weren’t enforced as strictly during Elon Musk’s time as a student. Enforcement of student visa restrictions, and the systems officials use to monitor compliance, intensified dramatically after the September 11 terror attacks, Swanson says. That was years after Elon Musk’s college graduation.
Without more information about what visas and work authorization he had — and when he had them — it’s impossible to draw conclusions about Elon Musk’s immigration journey, Swanson says. “It’s very unclear.”
“It does raise questions,” Swanson says, “but it doesn’t mean what he did wasn’t legal.”
Minear, the former American Immigration Lawyers Association president, also says it’s impossible to know Elon Musk’s immigration path without access to the paper trail in his government file. It’s possible he followed the requirements of his student visa, or that he was granted an exception allowing him to work.
Which institution was connected to his student visa, and when, are key details we don’t know, she said.
If his student visa was tied to a graduate program at Stanford, Minear said, he would have to be actively studying there to remain in status.
And if his work authorization was a form of optional practical training tied to his undergraduate studies at Penn, Minear says that typically would have required him to have graduated — something that Vance’s biography indicates Elon Musk did not do until 1997, well after Zip2 had been established. It would also require Musk to work in a field connected with his degrees, according to Minear.
University of Pennsylvania spokesman Ron Ozio confirmed to CNN that Musk officially graduated in 1997 with degrees in economics and physics.
In Vance’s biography, Musk is quoted stating he didn’t graduate in 1995 due to English and History coursework requirements he hadn’t completed. His degrees, he told Vance, were ultimately granted in 1997 because the requirements had changed.
Asked about reports that Musk deferred his Stanford enrollment days into the fall 1995 semester or dropped out of the school, an official at the university told CNN there’s no record he ever enrolled.
“We can confirm that Mr. Musk applied and was accepted to Stanford’s Materials Science and Engineering graduate program,” Stanford Engineering Associate Dean of Communications and Alumni Affairs Julie Greicius wrote in an email, “but we don’t have any record of him enrolling.”
‘What if Elon Musk had to go through the regular channel?’
Looking at the bigger picture, experts who spoke with CNN also noted that Elon Musk’s story is a telling example of the value immigrants bring to the country.
“The fact that he had any difficulty at all in getting to where he is because of immigration barriers, or (the possibility) that he was out of status at any time and unable to pursue his entrepreneurial goals…is a poor reflection on our current system and speaks to the need for it to be updated and changed,” Minear says.
It’s common for foreign students who dream of becoming entrepreneurs to face immigration hurdles, according to Rajshree Agarwal, director of the Ed Snider Center for Enterprise and Markets at the University of Maryland. Many are forced to pursue paths that require them to continue their studies or work in a lower-level position rather than striking out early on their own, she says.
Musk’s investors reportedly helping him obtain a visa “made him unconstrained from immigration much earlier than is the norm,” Agarwal says. His swift success shows how valuable such support can be, she says, and raises questions about what might have happened if he hadn’t gotten it.
Agarwal says based on her research and observations during her 30-year career as a professor, it’s typical for foreign students to face delays of up to 10 years between when they graduate and when they get a green card, the legal step that allows them to start a new venture. Exactly how much time the process can take varies depending on factors like caps on the number of visas issued and country of origin, she says.
“What if Elon Musk had to go through the regular channel and wait the average of 8 to 10 years … as opposed to being a founder that’s able to make decisions and get right to stakeholders already? Zip2 would not have been created. … What would have been the loss to this country?” she says.
Or, Agarwal asks, what would have happened if Musk had been deported or forced to return to Canada or South Africa?
He wasn’t, and in 1999, Compaq purchased Zip2 for more than $300 million in cash — a deal that provided Elon Musk with more than $20 million and a launch pad for his next entrepreneurial venture. Later that year, he became a cofounder of the online banking system that eventually became PayPal.
How Elon Musk’s views on immigration are shaping the conversation
His business successes since then are well documented — as are his increasingly pointed opinions about immigration.
A CNN analysis of Elon Musk’s posts on X found a marked increase in the number and frequency of his immigration-related posts starting around the time of his border visit last year. This year alone, he’s authored at least 150 immigration-related posts.
That tally, based on a search of immigration-related terms, doesn’t reflect times when Musk has simply shared others’ immigration-related posts or responded to them without directly mentioning words related to the topic — a common approach for Musk, according to Mert Can Bayar, a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Washington who studies conspiracy theories and misinformation.
Immigration-related posts from Musk in the past month include a question about whether Arizona is refusing to remove undocumented voters from its rolls, a message slamming unchecked illegal immigration as “civilizational suicide” and multiple posts arguing Democrats are deliberately importing migrants and pushing to legalize their status in order to secure political control.
But that hasn’t stopped Musk from focusing on the issue. And his posts have a particularly wide reach, Bayar says.
“He’s the most followed account on X. Every post he does gets millions of views. … When he points out something, it’s a disproportionate number of views, and a disproportionate amount of attention,” says Bayar, who’s traced Elon Musk’s role in spreading a resurgent rumor and a misleading video about non-citizens voting in US elections.
Zachary Mueller, senior research director for the immigrant advocacy organization America’s Voice, says Musk’s posts frequently echo the “great replacement theory,” which argues that elites are intentionally facilitating an invasion of non-White migrants to replace the power of White people.
“He’s amplifying it to a new level, and he becomes part of the problem,” Mueller says.
Musk has denied that he’s pushing the racist theory with his posts.
“I don’t subscribe to that. I’m simply saying there is an incentive here. … The more that come into the country, the more they’re likely to vote in that direction. It is, in my view, a simple incentive to increase Democratic voters,” he told Don Lemon earlier this year after the former CNN anchor pointed out that only US citizens can vote in federal elections.
But Mueller says there’s a dehumanizing and racist undertone to many of Musk’s immigration-related posts that shouldn’t be overlooked.
He called Musk’s recent remarks during a live conversation on X with Trump “quite disgustingly notable,” pointing out that Musk compared migrants at the border to a “World War Z zombie apocalypse.”
While some have downplayed the significance of Musk’s intensified focus on immigration, the entrepreneur’s frequent posts about the issue have caught the attention of policy experts like David Bier, director of immigration studies at the libertarian CATO Institute.
When Musk shared a post earlier this year stating that Democrats would not deport migrants because “every illegal is a highly likely vote at some point,” Bier responded with links to numerous articles refuting the claim. “This couldn’t be more wrong,” he wrote, pointing out not only the federal law establishing that only US citizens can vote in federal elections, but that most naturalized citizens don’t vote and that most formerly undocumented immigrants who received amnesty in the 1980s didn’t become citizens for decades, even though they were eligible.
Bier told CNN he felt like he had to chime in. Musk’s inaccurate political framing of the issue, he argues, overlooks the clear reality that economic forces are driving most migration.
“You can’t just totally ignore what he’s saying, because so many people are going to see everything he says,” Bier says. “And he’s a world-renowned entrepreneur. He does have some more clout, I think, than just a politician, who people are kind of more skeptical of.”
Beyond social media, there are signs Musk’s views on immigration and other issues are becoming more influential in the halls of power, too.
Trump has said that if he’s reelected, Musk could play a role in his next administration, as an advisor or in a Cabinet position helping improve government efficiency.
Rep. Joe Wilson, R-South Carolina, cited Musk in March remarks on the House floor.
“Yesterday Elon Musk shocked America,” Wilson began. He went on to quote one of Musk’s posts on X, which warned “it is highly probable that the groundwork is being laid for something far worse than 9/11. Just a matter of time.” The post included a link to an article describing flights of migrants into the US. Neither the article nor Musk’s post mentioned the flights were part of a government program that aims to create more pathways for migrants to enter the US legally and reduce pressure at the border.
Recent posts focus on pioneering space exploration — and more earthly concerns
A SpaceX rocket successfully launched into orbit for the first time on September 28, 2008 — the first time a privately funded rocket had done so. That achievement, and the intense fact-based research and development process at the company, were documented in a glowing GQ profile of Musk that year. The magazine noted that Musk’s companies were trying to find solutions — with solar power, space travel and electric cars — to what he saw as the major challenges of our time.
But on the 15th anniversary of that rocket launch — a major milestone in Musk’s entrepreneurial life — the billionaire was a world away from the SpaceX conference room where GQ had marveled at his ambitions.
On September 28, 2023, Elon Musk’s focus was decidedly earthbound, as he stood beside officials at the US-Mexico border and held his phone in the air.
“We’re just going to go around and talk to the major officials and law enforcement and whatnot that are here, and just kind of eyeball the situation, and get a sense of what’s going on, so you can get kind of, like, the real story,” he said in the live video he shared on X.
Critics argued Musk’s September 2023 border visit, while billed as unfiltered reality, only showed one, slanted side of the issue. But officials who spoke with Musk that day praised him.
“At least he showed up. … You’re talking about a person that can put out the truth and touch the world. I think that’s what Elon did whenever he visited the border, and we appreciate that,” Medina County Sheriff Randy Brown told Fox News.
Elon Musk hasn’t responded to questions from CNN about what he hopes others will see in his immigration story, or why he’s become increasingly focused on immigration.
A year later, there’s no sign Musk’s gaze has shifted.
As SpaceX’s Polaris Dawn mission began earlier this month, he posted frequently on X, touting the company’s space exploration efforts. But between posts about pioneering missions to the stars, he’s shared just as many messages about immigration and the US border.
Regardless of his motivations or the path he took to get here, it’s clear Elon Musk has added another item to his list of the world’s biggest challenges.
OpenAI chief technology officer Mira Murati resigned on Wednesday, saying she wants “the time and space to do my own exploration.” Murati had been among the three executives at the very top of the company behind ChatGPT, and she was briefly its leader last year while board members wrestled with the fate of CEO Sam Altman.
“There’s never an ideal time to step away from a place one cherishes, yet this moment feels right,” she wrote in a message to OpenAI staff that she posted on X.
Altman replied to Murati’s X post writing that “it’s hard to overstate how much Mira has meant to OpenAI, our mission, and to us all personally.” He added that he feels “personal gratitude towards her for the support and love during all the hard times.”
A successor wasn’t immediately announced.
Murati, through a personal spokesperson, declined to provide further comment. OpenAI also declined to comment, referring inquiries to Murati’s tweet.
Murati previously worked at Tesla and Leap Motion before joining OpenAI in 2018. At the time, OpenAI was a small nonprofit research lab focused on developing an AI system capable of mirroring a wide range of human tasks. But in the wake of the stunning success of ChatGPT, the organization has ballooned and its focus has increasingly turned commercial. The company has been rethinking its nonprofit structure, while investors have been increasingly eager to bet billions of dollars on its future.
Murati came to OpenAI believing that AI would “be the most important set of technologies that humanity has ever built,” she told Fortune last year. “OpenAI’s mission really resonated with me, to build a technology that benefits people.”
OpenAI was rocked by a dramatic board coup last November that saw CEO Sam Altman removed from his post and briefly replaced by Murati. After most of the staff threatened to resign, and following pleas from investors including Microsoft, which had poured billions into the company, Altman was reinstated with an all new board.
In the months that have followed, several of OpenAI’s leadership along with senior engineering figures have stepped away from the company. Ilya Sutskever, one of the company’s first hires, the technical brains behind much of its earlier work, and a board member who voted to remove Altman before recanting, resigned from the company in May.
Sutskever’s departure was followed shortly after by that of Jan Leike, an engineer who led work on long-term AI safety with Sutskever. John Schulman, the engineer who took over leadership of safety work, stepped down in August. In August, Greg Brockman, a cofounder of OpenAI and a board member who stood with Altman, said he was taking a sabbatical from the company until the end of the year.
A number of former OpenAI executives and researchers have gone on to start new AI companies. Notably, Sutskever this year launched Safe Superintelligence, which focuses on developing safe artificial intelligence. Former OpenAI research chief Dario Amodei and his sister Daniela in 2021 founded Anthropic, now one of the company’s primary rivals for customers.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
It’s also true that when one of those groundbreaking companies matures and faces challenges, a founder has a unique ability to make bold moves and stick to the original vision when others urge a less risky course. There are certainly cases where companies struggled when founders were replaced by managers. Remember Yahoo? And of course there’s Apple, where the founder returned and restored the company to its former glory and beyond.
But there are abundant counterexamples as well. Apple isn’t exactly struggling under Tim Cook. And consider Microsoft. Its CEO since 2014, Satya Nadella, had been a company lifer, slogging away in various divisions since 1992. Not a founder, nope. But he’s taken the company to new heights. Though Bill Gates is still revered at Microsoft, no one in the company wants him back at the top.
And god knows, there are plenty of cases where it wasn’t management fakers but stubborn founders who drove a company into the ground. My guess is that Travis Kalanick might have benefited from listening to stodgy managers. His replacement, a management type of dude, has made Uber profitable.
The fact is, not everyone is Brian Chesky, and no one is like Steve Jobs. The vast majority of companies never take off, and instead fade into ignominy. Very few founders get to the point where investors demand that they retain adult supervision to manage growth, because only the rarest of companies get to that point.
It’s fun to talk about founder mode, maybe for the same reason that some of us read Ben Horowitz’s founder-porn texts with our noses pressed to the window. Founder mode, which Graham predicts will one day get its closeup in management texts, really applies only to the most exceptional founders, the ones Steve Jobs once described as “the crazy ones.” Their companies aren’t called unicorns for nothing.
Time Travel
In 2007, I embedded in a Y Combinator batch of 12 companies. (Starting next year there will be four batches a year, with hundreds of startups.) It was clear even then that Graham, who was extremely hands-on, had developed his views on the primacy of founders. My story ran in Newsweek under the headline “Boot Camp for Billionaires.”
Every Tuesday during the program, Y Combinator hosts a dinner of chili or stew for the start-ups. At this first one, Graham and [cofounder Jessica] Livingston distribute gray T shirts emblazoned with one of Graham’s pithiest admonitions, MAKE SOMETHING PEOPLE WANT. A second, black shirt is bestowed only to start-ups that achieve a “liquidity event”—a purchase by a larger company or an IPO. It reads, I MADE SOMETHING PEOPLE WANT.
In the past week, the Kamala Harris presidential campaign and President Joe Biden both highlighted Trump’s August 15, 2017 comment, when the former president said there were “very fine people on both sides” of the clashes that followed the neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville.
For years, Trump supporters have defended his comments, claiming he was speaking about a nonexistent group of nonracist rallygoers who were there just to protest the removal of a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee.
While Trump did condemn the white supremacists and neo-Nazis who took part in the rally, those who covered the event have repeatedly pointed out that only extremists were involved in the march, including members of the so-called alt-right, white nationalists, neo-Nazis, Klansmen, and far-right militias. Trump’s “fine people” comments were at best misleading and at worst tacit support for extremists, despite his subsequent disavowal. Trump has consistently been slammed by critics for his comments, but false claims from Trump supporters have persisted. They resurfaced earlier this year when a Snopes fact check titled “No, Trump Did Not Call Neo-Nazis and White Supremacists ‘Very Fine People.’” Snopes later added an editor’s note, clarifying that those covering the rally said it was “conceived of, led by, and attended by white supremacists, and that therefore Trump’s characterization was wrong.”
But over the past few weeks, Trump’s supporters in Silicon Valley and Wall Street—some of whom began officially supporting the former president following his assassination attempt last month—have also tried to rewrite history.
David Marcus, the crypto entrepreneur and CEO of Lightspark who has been a Democratic Party supporter for years, posted last month that he was now backing Trump’s campaign.
In an X post last week that has been viewed 33 million times, Marcus claimed that Trump’s “very fine people” comment had been purposely taken out of context by the media. “Realizing that this was and continues to be a lie was a turning point for me,” Marcus wrote on X, quoting a post from the official Harris campaign account that marked the seven-year anniversary since Trump made the comments.
In response to Marcus’ post, Shaun Maguire, a partner at venture capital firm Sequoia Capital, wrote: “Totally agree.” Hours after the assassination attempt last month, Maguire said he was donating $300,000 to the Trump campaign.
This wasn’t the first time Maguire challenged what happened in Charlottesville: In June, Maguire cited a post from disinformation account End Wokeness and wrote on X: “Remember Charlottesville when Trump called neo-Nazis very fine people? I only saw the full clip for the first time today. It’s a must watch—he literally CONDEMNS the Neo Nazis and white nationalists.”
Steve Jobs is 28 years old, and seems a little nervous as he starts his speech to a group of designers gathered under a large tent in Aspen, Colorado. He fiddles with his bow tie and soon removes his suit jacket, dropping it to the floor when he finds no other place to set it down. It is 1983, and he’s about to ask designers for their help in improving the look of the coming wave of personal computers. But first he will tell them that those computers will shatter the lives they have led to date.
“How many of you are 36 years … older than 36?” he asks. That’s how old the computer is, he says. But even the younger people in the room, including himself, are sort of “precomputer,” members of the television generation. A distinct new generation, he says, is emerging: “In their lifetimes, the computer will be the predominant medium of communication.”
Quite a statement at the time, considering that very few of the audience, according to Jobs’ impromptu polling, owns a personal computer or has even seen one. Jobs tells the designers that they not only will soon use one, but it will be indispensable, and deeply woven into the fabric of their lives.
The video of this speech is the centerpiece of an online exhibit called The Objects of Our Life, presented by the Steve Jobs Archive, the ambitious history project devoted to telling the story of Apple’s fabled cofounder. When the exhibit went live earlier this month—after the discovery of a long-forgotten VHS tape in Jobs’ personal collection—I found it not only a compelling reminder of the late CEO, but pertinent to our own time, when another new technology is arriving with equal promise and peril.
The occasion of the speech was the annual Aspen International Design Conference. The theme of that year’s event was “The Future Isn’t What It Used to Be,” making Jobs the perfect speaker. While much of the talk is about his views on making products beautiful, the underlying message is straight out of that Bob Dylan tune: Something is happening and you don’t know what it is. He told his audience things that seemed preposterous: that in a few years more computers would be shipped than cars, and that people would spend more time with those computers than they spend riding in those cars. He told them that computers would become connected with each other, and everyone would use something called electronic mail, which he had to describe because it was such a strange concept then. Computers, he insisted, would become the dominant medium of communication. His goal was to make all that happen, to get to the point “where people are using these things and they go, ‘Wasn’t this the way it always was?’”
Jobs’ vision seemed to sway his audience, which gave him a standing ovation. Before he left Aspen that week, Jobs was asked to donate an object that would be placed in a time capsule that would commemorate the event. It was to be dug up in 2000. Jobs unhooked the mouse from the Lisa Computer he had brought to demo, and it was sealed in the capsule, along with an 8-track tape of the Moody Blues and a six-pack of beer.
The speech itself is kind of a time capsule. Jobs was right when he said one day we would not be able to imagine what life was like before these new tools he was ushering into the mainstream. Those of us still around who are, in Jobs’ term, “born precomputer” often astound young people by describing how we did our work (manual typewriters! carbon copies!), communicated with each other (phone booths!), and entertained ourselves (three TV channels! Bonanza!) before computers became our virtual appendages.
Leah Feiger: I hate all of these terms, just so you guys know. I hate them so much.
Lauren Goode: We don’t ever have to say it again, Leah, but yes, welcome to Silicon Valley, and I think they see what’s happening right now, scrutiny on Big Tech (and little tech to an extent), some of the regulatory proposals and actual regulatory actions that have come down on new and emerging technologies, they see that as all counterproductive to their end goals. And so if they can get in there and get into the ear of the most influential politician, the leader of the free world—who by the way, Trump has said that he would dismantle a lot of the government and regulatory bodies that we’re all used to at this point, that would benefit them in some way. Honestly, it’s a lot of self-interest.
Makena Kelly: Yeah, and a lot of … It’s not even just the candidates, right? It’s also who they will appoint in really important positions that these companies will interface with, whether that’s the DHS and immigration policy with H-1B visas, or of course the biggest villain in the government right now is Lina Kahn for these folks too.
Leah Feiger: Sure.
Lauren Goode: Except for JD Vance apparently, who in the past has made statements of support for Lina Kahn, but he changes his mind, we think.
Leah Feiger: Like every five minutes, basically. We have so much more to get into, and I have no doubt that we’re going to hopefully have you guys on again to keep talking about Silicon Valley and its influence on this race. But Lauren and Makena, thank you so, so much for joining us for now. We’ll talk to you later for Conspiracy of the Week.
Makena Kelly: Thanks.
Lauren Goode: Sounds great. I can’t wait.
Leah Feiger: After the break, David Gilbert on how Republicans are calling Biden’s exit from the race a “coup.”
[break]
Leah Feiger: Welcome back to WIRED Politics Lab. So Biden announced his withdrawal from the 2024 election at around 2 o’clock on Sunday. Immediately the far right and mainstream Republican lawmakers jumped on the news to call it a “coup.” Joining me from Cork, Ireland, to talk about the right-wing reactions he’s been watching online is WIRED reporter David Gilbert. David, hi. How’s it going?
David Gilbert: It’s going good. Good to be here.
Leah Feiger: David, you started seeing this coup language far before Biden actually dropped out. When did you first pick up on it?
David Gilbert: I suppose it was probably maybe a week, two weeks before the announcement on Sunday. It had been building for a while, this idea that Trump was kind of set up to campaign against Biden and wanted to campaign against him because of how successful he had been in the debate or how poor Biden had been, I guess. So in the weeks between the debate and when Biden dropped out, we’d seen this idea from the right that the efforts being made on the Democratic side to effectively push Biden out were part of a so-called coup. I think it was last week in The Babylon Bee, this satirical right-wing online website, had a headline saying, “Democratic Party leaders vote to save democracy by overruling voters staging coup.” Dan Bongino, the right-wing commentator, he was talking about a coup on Twitter last week. So it was definitely building in the days and weeks leading up to Biden’s departure.
