Bitter infighting has erupted between tech billionaire Elon Musk and Donald Trump’s hard-line Make America great Again (Maga) base after the US president-elect chose an Indian-origin entrepreneur to be his business adviser. ‘artificial intelligence.
The dispute pitted Musk and fellow entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy against die-hard supporters, including far-right activist Laura Loomer and Matt Gaetz, a former congressman and failed candidate for attorney general. The row threatens to open a chasm among Trump’s supporters over immigration, a key issue in his election victory.
Presaging what has been called a “Maga civil war,” Musk went on the offensive after Loomer criticized the choice of Sriram Krishnan, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist, as the company’s AI policy advisor. new administration, calling it “deeply troubling.”
Loomer, a renowned anti-immigration provocateur widely credited with persuading Trump to highlight false rumors that Haitian immigrants were eating pets during last September’s presidential debate with Kamala Harris, criticized Krishnan on social media for supported the expansion of visas and green cards for skilled workers. She said it was in “direct opposition” to Trump’s agenda.
His comments provoked a response from Elon Musk, the Space X and Tesla billionaire, Trump’s most influential supporter and himself an immigrant from South Africa.
“There is an ongoing shortage of excellent engineering talent. This is the fundamental limiting factor in Silicon Valley,” Musk said on X, the social media platform he owns, on Christmas Day.
In a later article, he wrote: “It comes down to this: do you want America to WIN or do you want America to LOSE. If you force the best talent in the world to play for the other side, America will lose. End of story.
Musk’s position was supported by Ramaswamy, his partner in the newly formed “Department of Government Effectiveness” (Doge), an informal agency that Trump claims he will create, in which the two men will be tasked with to reduce public spending.
In a lengthy social media post, Ramaswamy – the son of Indian immigrants – claimed the United States was doomed to decline without highly skilled foreign workers and suggested American culture had moved toward “mediocrity.” .
“The reason big tech companies often hire first-generation, foreign-born engineers rather than ‘native’ Americans is not due to an innate American IQ deficit,” he wrote.
“A key element comes down to the C word: culture.
“Our American culture has for too long worshiped mediocrity over excellence. It doesn’t start in college, it starts YOUNG.
“A culture that celebrates the prom queen rather than the math Olympiad champion, or the athlete rather than the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers. “Normal” is not enough in a hyper-competitive global market for technical talent. And if we pretend to do it, China will kick our ass.”
The arguments were met with backlash from Maga supporters, led by Loomer, who delved into racist arguments.
“@VivekGRamaswamy knows the Great Replacement is real,” she wrote. “It’s not racist against Indians to want the original MAGA policies I voted for. I voted for a reduction in H1B visas. Not an extension.
“Tech billionaires can’t just walk into Mar-a-Lago and caress their enormous checkbooks and rewrite our immigration policy so that we have unlimited numbers of slave laborers from India and China who won’t assimilate Never.
“You don’t even know what MAGA’s immigration policy is.”
Ramaswamy’s argument was also criticized by pro-Trump podcaster Brenden Dilley, who posted: “I always love it when these tech bros flat out tell you that they have no understanding of American culture and have then have the nerve to tell you that YOU are the problem with America.
And even Nikki Haley, a former Republican presidential candidate and Trump critic whose parents were also Indian immigrants, posted: “There is nothing wrong with American workers or American culture. Just look at the border and see how many people want what we have. We should invest and prioritize Americans, not foreign workers.
These arguments portend a battle to win the ear of Trump, who based his political appeal on an anti-immigration message and who, during his first presidency, restricted access to H-1B visas, arguing that they risked being abusive.
But during his recent presidential campaign, the president-elect appeared open to legal immigration of educated workers, saying he wanted to grant permanent resident status to foreign nationals who graduated from a university in the United States.
“If you get a degree or a doctorate at a university, you should be able to stay in this country,” he told the All In podcast last June.
Samuel Hammond, senior economist at the Foundation for American Innovation, said the dispute highlights the likelihood of future conflict within the Trump administration. “It’s a sign of future conflicts,” he told the Washington Post. “It’s like pre-game.”
