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As the issue of illegal immigration continued to pop in 2016 presidential election debates, a meme began circulating on Facebook claiming that Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla Motors, was once an undocumented immigrant: Musk indeed entered the United States an immigrant, but there is little evidence that he was ever in the U.S. without documentation. According to an Esquire profile of Musk, he was born in South Africa and obtained Canadian citizenship through his mother in 1989: Musk first came to the United States in 1992 after transferring from Queen's University in Ontario to the University of Pennsylvania. He said in an interview his decision attend school in the United States was based partly on his desire to get an education, but also because the move would allow him to remain in the country afterwards: Musk moved to California in 1995, and in 2002 he officially became an American citizen: The meme likely originated with an appearance Musk made on The Dinner Program. While Musk's brother Kimbal once joked that they had been illegal immigrants, Elon said that this was a gray area (and indeed, American immigration policy in all its complexity contains a good number of gray areas) and that he considers himself a legal immigrant: Musk also stated that he was a legal immigrant during an episode of PBS' Think Tank in 2007: While the Tesla Motors co-founder spent more than ten years in the United States prior to becoming a citizen in 2002, it appears that he did so legally through various visa programs.
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