From Elon Musk to Satya Nadella from Microsoft, these technology chiefs were formerly HA-1B visa holders

President Donald Trump seeks to restrict and revise the Visa H-1 B program, which has enabled American companies to hire foreign talents in professions such as IT, health care and engineering for decades.

The program has been a subject of debate among Washington legislators for years, many opponents arguing that it suppresses the possibilities of employment for American nationals and is full of abuse.

In response, Trump has announced a plan to impose costs of $ 100,000 on H-1B requests, which could have a strong impact on the ability of American companies to support visas.

One thing that cannot be challenged, however, is that the program is part of the course of a considerable number of American technologies and business leaders since its creation in 1990.

Here is a list of some of the biggest.

Elon Musk, the richest man in the world and the founder of a raft of eminent technological societies in the United States, is not only one of the most eminent H-1B visa recipients, but also one of the most vocal defenders in the program.

Originally born in South Africa, Musk moved to the United States in 1992 when he was transferred to the University of Pennsylvania to continue his studies. He then attended Stanford before abandoning to continue entrepreneurial companies in Silicon Valley.

Although some details of his early visa situation have been debated, Musk said by saying the reason he is in the United States, as well as “so many critical people who have built Spacex, Tesla and hundreds of other companies that have returned strong America”, was the H-1B visa.

However, the billionaire, who has become very involved in the United States and global policy, also supported the overhaul and reform of the H-1B system in the past.

Eric Yuan, the 55-year-old founder and CEO of zoom, immigrated to the United States from China in 1997 on an H-1B visa, although his trip was anything but easy.

Yuan was sponsored for his H-1B visa to work as an engineer at Cisco-Webex, but has only been approved for his ninth test, he said in a nouge giant podcast in 2020.

Although he spoke very little English when he arrived in the United States, he was going to launch Zoom in 2011. The company’s IPO in 2019 assessed Yuan’s shares in the billions.

Although Yuan has not publicly commented on the H-1B visa program, he told CNBC in 2019 that the United States’s opening up to immigration was healthy and that it expects this culture to persist.

Born and raised in India, Satya Nadella, Chairman and CEO of Microsoftis also a former beneficiary of an H-1B visa, although its circumstances are quite unique.

In the United States since 1990, he has held a very coveted green card until he abandoned to bring his wife to the country thanks to a successful H-1B visa request but otherwise risky in 1994.

“The idea that you need to give up your green card to get an H-1B is, retrospectively, silly. And therefore, therefore, take the reform so that it works for us, both our security but also that our competitiveness,” said Nadella in an interview in 2017 with CNBC.

In 2017, speaking of the podcast “ Make Me Smart ”, Nadella defended the Visa H-1B program, saying that he provided Microsoft with a highly qualified workforce which helped him to remain competitive on a global scale, although he hosted an executive decree examining H-1B for abuse under the first Trump administration.

Jayshree Ullal, CEO of the Cloud Networks Networks networking company, was born in the United Kingdom and grew up in New Delhi, before moving to the United States at the age of 16 and began his studies at the San Francisco State University.

After completing a master’s degree at the University of Santa Clara, she worked for eminent technological companies such as FairiLd Semiconductor, Advanced Micro Devices and Cisco.

Somewhere at that time, Ullal had received a H-1B visa, a CEO representative had previously disclosed in Forbes. Arista did not respond to a request for CNBC comments.

Although Ullal’s H-1B trips are unknown, she expressed her support for immigration reform and easier for foreign workers in the United States in the past.

Addressing Times of India in 2023, she declared that the immigration process had become too difficult with permanent residence visas which took up to 15 years to secure, which is “a large part of the professional life of a professional person”.

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

According to Forbes, Ullal is one of the handles of billionaires immigrants in the United States with a net value of $ 6 billion.

Jeff Skoll, the first president of Ebay – now PhilanthropE and president of Capricorn Investment Group – is another former H -1B visa holder who defended the program, while supporting the reforms.

As a Canadian, he graduated from the University of Toronto in 1987 before coming to America to study at the University of Stanford. He would later obtain an H-1B visa in 1996 when he started working for Ebay and his founder, Pierre Omidyar.

In December of last year, Skoll was alongside Elon Musk defending the H-1B visa, while recommending improvements and certain program reforms.

“For me personally, it was a fight of life (and) of death to obtain and keep an H-1B visa, even if I got out of the Stanford Business School, worked with Pierre Omidyar on (a student working visa) while we built Ebay from zero,” he said in a Post.

Skoll said he almost needed to leave the country after being refused for an H-1B visa extension if this was not the case for his strong connections at the time.

He added that Ebay and his other organizations encountered countless problems postulated for H-1BS, even if the required work was very specialized in most cases, and there were no domestic candidates.