From Elon Musk to Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, these tech leaders were once H-1B visa holders 

President Donald Trump is wanting to restrict and overhaul the H-1 B visa program, which has allowed U.S. firms to rent international expertise in occupations equivalent to IT, healthcare and engineering for many years.

The program has been a subject of debate amongst lawmakers in Washington for years, with many opponents arguing that it removes job alternatives for U.S. nationals and is rife with abuse.

In response, Trump announced a plan to impose $100,000 charges on H-1B functions, which may severely impression American firms’ capacity to help the visas.

One factor that may’t be disputed, nevertheless, is that this system has been a part of the journey of a substantial variety of American expertise and enterprise leaders since its inception in 1990.

Here is a listing of among the highest-profile ones. 

Originally born in South Africa, Musk moved to the U.S. in 1992 when he transferred to the University of Pennsylvania to pursue his research. He later attended Stanford earlier than dropping out to pursue entrepreneurial ventures in Silicon Valley. 

While some particulars of his early visa situation have been debated, Musk has gone on record saying the explanation he’s within the U.S., together with “so many crucial individuals who constructed SpaceX, Tesla and hundreds of other companies that made America strong,” was the H-1B visa. 

Still, the billionaire, who has grow to be extremely concerned in U.S. and international politics, has additionally supported the overhaul and reformation of the H-1B system previously. 

Eric Yuan,  the 55-year-old founder and CEO of Zoom, immigrated to the U.S. from China in 1997 on an H-1B visa, although his journey was something however simple.

Yuan was sponsored for an H-1B visa by video conferencing firm Webex — later acquired by Cisco Systems — however was solely permitted on his ninth try, he mentioned on a Cloud Giant podcast in 2020.

Despite talking very little English upon his arrival within the U.S., he would go on to launch Zoom in 2011. The firm’s IPO in 2019 valued Yuan’s shares within the billions.

While Yuan has not publicly commented a lot concerning the H-1B visa program, he told CNBC in 2019 that the United States’ openness to immigration is wholesome and that he expects that tradition to persist.

Born and raised in India, Satya Nadella, chairman and CEO of Microsoft, can be a former recipient of an H-1B visa, although his circumstances were fairly distinctive. 

Having been within the U.S. since 1990, he held a extremely coveted inexperienced card till he gave it up to bring his wife into the nation by way of a profitable, however in any other case dangerous, H-1B visa utility in 1994. 

“The idea that you have to give up your green card to get an H-1B is, in retrospect, silly. And so therefore let us in fact take the reform so that it works for us, both our security but as well as our competitiveness,” mentioned Nadella in a 2017 interview with CNBC. 

Back in 2017, talking on the ‘Make Me Smart’ podcast, Nadella defended the H-1B visa program, saying that it supplied Microsoft with high-skilled labor that helped it stay globally aggressive, although he welcomed an govt order reviewing H-1B for abuses underneath the primary Trump administration.

Jayshree Ullal, CEO of cloud networking company Arista Networks, was born within the United Kingdom and raised in New Delhi, earlier than she moved to the U.S. on the age of 16 and started her research at San Francisco State University.

After finishing a grasp’s diploma at Santa Clara University, she went on to work for outstanding tech firms, together with Fairchild Semiconductor, Advanced Micro Devices, and Cisco.

Somewhere in that point, Ullal had been a recipient of an H-1B visa, a consultant of the CEO had previously disclosed to Forbes. Arista didn’t reply to a request for remark from CNBC.

While particulars of Ullal’s H-1B journey are unknown, she has voiced help for immigration reform and simpler pathways for international staff to the U.S. previously.

Speaking to Times of India in 2023, she mentioned the immigration course of had grow to be overly difficult with everlasting residence visas taking over to 15 years to safe, which is “a large chunk of a professional person’s work life.”

“At Arista, we believe that the best developers can come from anywhere and there is a global distribution of engineering talent — virtual or physical,” she added.

Ullal is among the handful of immigrant billionaires within the U.S. at present with a internet price of $6 billion, in accordance to Forbes.

Jeff Skoll, the primary President of eBay — now a philanthropist and chairman of Capricorn Investment Group — is one other former H-1B visa holder who has advocated for this system, whereas supporting focused reforms.

As a Canadian, he graduated from the University of Toronto in 1987 earlier than he got here to America to research at Stanford University. He would later receive an H-1B visa in 1996 when he started working for eBay and its founder, Pierre Omidyar. 

In December of final 12 months, Skoll joined Elon Musk in defending the necessity for H-1B visas, though they supported some adjustments, equivalent to the next minimal wage and yearly charges that would incentivize home hires.

“For me personally it was a life [and] death fight to get and keep an H-1B visa, even though I had come out of Stanford Business School, worked with Pierre Omidyar on [a student work visa] while we built eBay from scratch,” he said in an X post.

According to Skoll, he almost wanted to go away the nation after being turned down for an H-1B visa extension, had it not been for his sturdy connections on the time.

He added that eBay and his different organizations have encountered quite a few issues making use of for H-1Bs, even when hiring for specialised work through which there were no home candidates.