Elon Musk launched his career working illegally

Many Americans don't realize how easy it is to fall into some sort of "illegal" status in the US.

I have been stranding in the US with expired status at the beginning of the pandemic. I filed change of status but USCIS never approved it before I gave it up and left to a third country to apply for the visa. (So technically the CoS was automatically rejected and the months were retrospectively counted as illegal presence.)

And now, in a few days, my wife will have to suspend her job because the USCIS keep delaying the decision on her H1B CoS, due to some "additional security check".

“Actually, I didn’t really care much for the degree, but I had no money for a lab and no legal right to stay in the country, so that seemed like a good way to solve both issues,” Musk wrote. “Then the internet came along, which seemed like a much surer bet.”

"Musk never enrolled at Stanford. In a May 2009 deposition, he said he called the department chair two days after the start of the semester to say he wasn’t going to attend...

...In the same deposition, he said he began working at Zip2 — originally called Global Link Information Network — in August or September 1995.

Upon not enrolling, Musk would have had to leave the country, according to legal experts and immigration laws at the time. He would not have been allowed to work. While overstaying a student visa is somewhat common and officials have at times turned a blind eye to it, it remains illegal.

The revelation that Musk lacked the legal right to work in the United States stands at odds with his recent focus on undocumented immigrants and U.S. border security, among the issues that have led him to spend more than $100 million helping Trump return to the White House..."