Since assuming office in January, U.S. President Donald Trump has initiated a broad immigration crackdown. The most recent step involves overhauling the H-1B visa programme, marking one of the most significant efforts so far to reshape temporary work visas.
Amid the fee hike and the proposal to revamp, the H-1B visa programme has been a part of the journey for many technology and business leaders since its inception in 1990.
Here is a list of top business leaders who had H-1B visas —
Elon Musk
Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and Tesla boss, is not only a recipient of an H-1B visa but also a prominent supporter of the programme, according to a report by CNBC.
Born in South Africa, Musk moved to the U.S. in 1992 to attend the University of Pennsylvania. He then went to Stanford but left to start his entrepreneurial journey in Silicon Valley.
Although some specifics of his early visa status are unclear, Musk has stated that the main reason he is in the U.S., along with many key individuals who built SpaceX, Tesla, and numerous other companies that strengthened America, was the H-1B visa.
Satya Nadella
Satya Nadella, born and raised in India and now chairman and CEO of Microsoft, has a unique visa history. He has been in the US since 1990, initially holding a green card. He later gave it up for his wife’s immigration through an H-1B visa application.
“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,” Nadella said in a 2017 interview with CNBC.
In 2017, Nadella discussed the H-1B visa programme on the ‘Make Me Smart’ podcast, supporting it as a source of high-skilled labour that kept Microsoft competitive across the globe. However, he also expressed support for an executive order during the Trump administration that aimed to review the programme for potential abuses.
Eric Yuan
Eric Yuan, founder and CEO of Zoom, moved to the US from China in 1997 on an H-1B visa. Yuan was sponsored by Webex, a video conferencing company later bought by Cisco Systems, but he received approval only after nine attempts, as he mentioned on a Cloud Giant podcast in 2020.
Yuan has not spoken extensively about the H-1B visa programme publicly, however he mentioned to CNBC in 2019 that the United States welcoming attitude towards immigration is positive.
Jeffrey Skoll
Jeffrey Skoll, the first President of eBay and now a philanthropist and chairman of Capricorn Investment Group, is a former H-1B visa holder who has supported the programme and called for targeted reforms.
Being a Canadian, he graduated from the University of Toronto in 1987 before moving to America to attend Stanford University. He later received an H-1B visa in 1996, which allowed him to start working for eBay and its founder, Pierre Omidyar.
“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.
Jayshree Ullal
Jayshree Ullal, CEO of Arista Networks, a cloud networking company, was born in the UK and grew up in New Delhi. She moved to the U.S. at 16 and started her studies at San Francisco State University.
After finishing her master’s degree from Santa Clara University, she started working at leading tech firms such as Fairchild Semiconductor, Advanced Micro Devices, and Cisco.
At some point during that period, Ullal had been a recipient of an H-1B visa, a representative of the CEO had earlier told Forbes.
