'Elon Musk is wrong': Bernie Sanders gives blunt takedown of Trump ally
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) stepped into the boiling debate over the H1-B visa program and took aim at tech billionaire Elon Musk.
The progressive senator on Thursday called out Musk for his passionate defense of U.S. companies hiring foreign workers through the program – which reportedly includes Tesla. And he had his own theory of why the world’s richest man is in favor of the visa program.
“Elon Musk is wrong,” Sanders wrote Thursday in a post to his X account. “The main function of the H-1B visa program is not to hire ‘the best and the brightest,’ but rather to replace good-paying American jobs with low-wage indentured servants from abroad. The cheaper the labor they hire, the more money the billionaires make.”
Over the past week, tensions have flared in MAGA world after Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy called for an increase in H-1B visa and suggested U.S. workers were not up to par with foreign workers. President-elect Donald Trump – who tapped the two billionaires to lead the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, – publicly sided with Musk on the issue.
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But Sanders, who chairs the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, waded into the debate armed with facts. In a statement attached to his social media post, the Vermont senator continued his attacks on Musk using labor figures, Census Bureau data, and the hiring track record of Musk’s own company.
“If there is really a shortage of skilled tech workers in America, why did Tesla lay-off over 7,500 American workers this year – including many software developers and engineers at its factory in Austin, Texas – while being approved to employ thousands of H1-B guest workers?” Sanders wrote.
He also criticized Tesla’s starting rates for H1-B guest workers for jobs like associate accountants, associate mechanical engineers and associate material planners – which he said are “as little as” $58,000, $70,000 and $80,000 a year, respectively
“Those don’t sound like highly specialized jobs that are for the top 0.1 percent as Musk claimed this week,” Sanders said.
He took one more shot at Musk as he concluded his takedown.
“Bottom line. It should never be cheaper for a corporation to hire a guest worker from overseas than an American worker,” Sanders wrote.