Musk "U.S. Appointed Indian due to lack of talent"

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has defended the lack of tech talent in the United States after U.S. President-elect Donald Trump recently appointed an information technology (IT) expert who is an immigrant of Indian descent as a major policy adviser.

The debate was sparked by Trump's appointment of Indian IT expert Sriram Krishnan as senior policy adviser to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy on the 22nd.

Krishnan was born in India and is known to have moved to the United States after finishing college in India.

Krishnan, who has worked with leading IT companies including Microsoft and Meta, Twitter, Snap and Yahoo, has also served as executive partner of venture capitalist Andriesen Horowitz.

He is also known to be close to Musk, helping manage the company for a while shortly after Musk acquired Twitter in 2022.

But among Trump supporters, conservative hardliners took issue with Krishnan's posting on X last month that "it would be great to remove the cap on permanent residency for tech immigrants" and asking Musk, who was named co-head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), to consider it.

Laura Loomer, a conservative hardline activist, criticized Krishnan's appointment on Sunday, saying, "He argues that the green card restrictions should be eliminated so that foreign students can come to the United States and take away jobs that should be given to American students."

He added, "It is very worrisome that left-wing figures who share views directly opposing Trump's America First policy are being appointed to the Trump administration."

There was a series of articles online that agreed with this view, and one X user posted a picture of Krishnan and wrote, "Who among you voted for this Indian to lead the United States?"

Then tech giants from Silicon Valley came out in defense of Krishnan.

David Sax, the former chief operating officer of PayPal, who was named the "Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Virtual Currency Tsar" of Trump's second White House, said, "Sri Ram has been an American citizen for more than a decade, and he is not leading the United States. He will advise on AI policies," he explained.

"In fact, he wants to make the green card program for tech jobs an entirely performance-based program," he defended, adding that "supporting a limited number of highly skilled immigrants is still the general view of the right, and Sriram is clearly not on the left."

Musk then commented that it was "reasonable" and sympathized with it.

In addition, Musk shared an X post claiming Silicon Valley lacks engineering talent and wrote, "Too few engineers and motivated people in the United States."

"Think of it as a professional sports team. If the team wants to win the championship, they need to recruit the best talent from anywhere. This allows the team to win," he added.

Writing on Vivek Ramaswamido X, an Indian-entrepreneur-turned-politician named co-head of the government's efficiency department along with Musk, he argued that "the reason top tech companies hire foreign-born engineers over Americans is not because of a lack of natural IQ from Americans."

"Our American culture has worshipped mediocrity rather than excellence for too long," he said, adding, "A culture that praises the graduation party queen more than the mathematics Olympiad winner and the athletic male student more than the (honorary) valedictorian does not produce the best engineers."