From Elon Musk to Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, these tech leaders were once H-1B visa holders 

President Donald Trump is looking to restrict and overhaul the H-1 B visa program, which has allowed U.S. companies to hire foreign talent in occupations such as IT, healthcare and engineering for decades.

The program has been a topic of debate among lawmakers in Washington for years, with many opponents arguing that it removes job opportunities for U.S. nationals and is rife with abuse.

In response, Trump announced a plan to impose $100,000 fees on H-1B applications, which could severely impact American companies’ ability to support the visas.

One thing that can’t be disputed, however, is that the program has been part of the journey of a considerable number of American technology and business leaders since its inception in 1990.

Here is a list of some of the highest-profile ones. 

Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and the founder of a raft of prominent tech companies in the U.S., is not only one of the most prominent H-1B visa recipients but also one of the most vocal advocates of the program.

Originally born in South Africa, Musk moved to the U.S. in 1992 when he transferred to the University of Pennsylvania to pursue his studies. He later attended Stanford before dropping out to pursue entrepreneurial ventures in Silicon Valley. 

While some details of his early visa situation have been debated, Musk has gone on record saying the reason he is in the U.S., along with “so many critical people who built SpaceX, Tesla and hundreds of other companies that made America strong,” was the H-1B visa. 

Still, the billionaire, who has become highly involved in U.S. and global politics, has also supported the overhaul and reformation of the H-1B system in the past. 

Eric Yuan,  the 55-year-old founder and CEO of Zoom, immigrated to the U.S. from China in 1997 on an H-1B visa, though his journey was anything but easy.

Yuan was sponsored for his H-1B visa to work as an engineer at Cisco-Webex, but was only approved for it on his ninth try, he said in a Cloud Giant podcast in 2020.

Despite speaking very little English upon his arrival in the U.S., he would go on to launch Zoom in 2011. The company’s IPO in 2019 valued Yuan’s shares in the billions.

While Yuan has not publicly commented much about the H-1B visa program, he told CNBC in 2019 that the United States’ openness to immigration is healthy and that he expects that culture to persist.

Born and raised in India, Satya Nadella, chairman and CEO of Microsoft, is also a former recipient of an H-1B visa, though his circumstances were quite unique. 

Having been in the U.S. since 1990, he held a highly coveted green card until he gave it up to bring his wife into the country through a successful, but otherwise risky, H-1B visa application in 1994. 

“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,” said Nadella in a 2017 interview with CNBC. 

Back in 2017, speaking on the ‘Make Me Smart’ podcast, Nadella defended the H-1B visa program, saying that it provided Microsoft with high-skilled labor that helped it remain globally competitive, though he welcomed an executive order reviewing H-1B for abuses under the first Trump administration.

Jayshree Ullal, CEO of cloud networking company Arista Networks, was born in the United Kingdom and raised in New Delhi, before she moved to the U.S. at the age of 16 and began her studies at San Francisco State University.

After finishing a master’s at Santa Clara University, she worked for prominent tech companies like Fairchild Semiconductor, Advanced Micro Devices and Cisco.

Somewhere in that time, Ullal had been a recipient of an H-1B visa, a representative of the CEO had previously disclosed to Forbes. Arista did not respond to a request for comment from CNBC.

While details of Ullal’s H-1B journey are unknown, she has voiced support for immigration reform and easier pathways for foreign workers to the U.S. in the past.

Speaking to Times of India in 2023, she said the immigration process had become overly challenging with permanent residence visas taking up to 15 years to secure, which is “a large chunk of a professional person’s work life.”

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

Ullal is one of the handful of immigrant billionaires in the U.S. today with a net worth of $6 billion, according to Forbes.

Jeff Skoll, the first President of eBay — now a philanthropist and chairman of Capricorn Investment Group — is another former H-1B visa holder who has defended the program, while supporting reforms.

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

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

“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.

Skoll said he nearly needed to leave the country after being turned down for an H-1B visa extension if it hadn’t been for his strong connections at the time.

He added that eBay and his other organizations have run into countless problems applying for H-1Bs, even though the work required was very specialized in most cases, and there were no domestic applicants.