Steve Bannon has called for Elon Musk to be deported from the United States, after the dramatic bust up between the tech billionaire and President Donald Trump.
In his War Room podcast Thursday, Trump’s former White House chief strategist from his first term said: “Elon Musk is illegal … Deport immediately.” The validity of Bannon’s claim about Musk’s naturalized U.S. citizen status is now likely to face more scrutiny than ever.
Newsweek contacted Musk for comment on Friday via emails sent to the press offices of Tesla and SpaceX, where he serves as CEO, outside of regular office hours.
Why It Matters
Over the past few months Musk had been one of Trump’s closest political allies spending $292 million to support him and other Republicans during the 2024 presidential election, providing vocal support on his social media platform X and heading the newly created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) which he left at the end of May.
However, in the past week this relationship unraveled and Musk has now suggested Trump should be impeached and replaced by Vice President JD Vance, while the president suggested Musk’s companies could lose government contracts potentially imperiling SpaceX’s relationship with NASA.
What To Know
Speaking to the New York Times on Thursday, prominent conservative commentator Bannon said: “They should initiate a formal investigation of his immigration status because I am of the strong belief that he is an illegal alien, and he should be deported from the country immediately.”
Bannon later doubled down on this argument during an appearance on his War Room podcast when he said: “Elon Musk is illegal, and he’s got to go. He’s illegal? Deport immediately.”
“You’re going to ship these other people home. Let’s start with the South Africans, OK?”
In October, 2024, the Washington Post published an article claiming that Musk had previously “worked illegally in the United States” by setting up a company while on a student visa in 1995, despite never enrolling in Stanford University as promised.
Citing “former business associates, court records and company documents” the publication said Musk used a J-1 student visa to enter the U.S. but instead worked on a startup that became Zip2 without the requisite work visa.
According to the Post, in a 2005 email used in a defamation lawsuit, Musk admitted that he applied to Stanford because he otherwise had “no legal right to stay in the country.”
President Donald Trump speaking at a roundtable in the State Dining Room at the White House on June 05, 2025 in Washington, D.C. (left) and Elon Musk addressing reporters in the Oval Office of the White House on May 30, 2025 in Washington, D.C. (right).
Anna Moneymaker/Kevin Dietsch/GETTY
The case was raised at a campaign event by then President Joe Biden who said: “That wealthiest man in the world turned out to be [an] illegal worker here when he was here.
“I’m serious. He was supposed to be in school when he came on a student visa. He wasn’t in school. He was violating the law. He’s talking about all these illegals coming our way?”
In a post on X shortly after the Post‘s story was published Musk denied the allegation against him, saying: “I was in fact allowed to work in the U.S.”
Born in Pretoria, South Africa, in 1971, Musk moved to Canada in 1989 and later to the United States in 1992 to attend the University of Pennsylvania. He became a U.S. citizen in 2002 through the naturalization process after several years of living and working in the country.
U.S. law states that citizenship gained through naturalization can be revoked if it was “procured by concealment of a material fact or by willful misrepresentation.”
Speaking to Wired about Musk, Professor Stephen Yale-Loehr, an immigration law expert at Cornell Law School, said that if the claims of illegal working are true “on purely legal grounds, this would justify revoking citizenship, because if he had told the truth, he would not have been eligible for an H1-B, a green card, or naturalization.”
Amanda Frost, a legal expert at the University of Virginia, said: “If a noncitizen violated the terms of a nonimmigrant visa, and then adjusted to immigrant (green card) status without admitting the violation, and then naturalized without admitting the violation, that person could be denaturalized on the ground that their naturalization was ‘illegally procured.”
In a string of attacks on Friday, Musk called for Trump to be impeached, described what the president called his “Big Beautiful [spending] Bill” as “The Big Ugly Bill” and said Trump’s tariffs policy would cause a recession in the second half of 2025.
Trump fired back on his Truth Social website claiming Musk “just went CRAZY” adding: “The easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of Dollars, is to terminate Elon’s Governmental Subsidies and Contracts. I was always surprised that Biden didn’t do it!”
As the row intensified Musk posted: “Time to drop the really big bomb: @realDonaldTrump is in the Epstein files. That is the real reason they have not been made public.”
But Musk provided no support for that claim. Trump’s name features in some previously released court documents on Epstein, but he has not been accused of wrongdoing, and there is no evidence he is mentioned in any unseen files related to Epstein.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt dismissed a question about the claim, saying: “This is an unfortunate episode from Elon, who is unhappy with the One Big Beautiful Bill because it does not include the policies he wanted. The President is focused on passing this historic piece of legislation and making our country great again.”
What People Are Saying
In a post on X, conservative commentator Charlie Kirk said: “Let me get this straight: Democrats tried to put Trump in prison for 700 years, take his business empire from him, impeach him twice, take him off the ballot, and censor him on all social media—all the while they were sitting on info that Trump was on the Epstein list? This is total and complete nonsense.”
Reacting to the Trump-Musk bust up House Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said: “Oh man the girls are fighting aren’t they?”
On X, Ashley St. Clair, the mother of one of Musk’s children, posted: “hey @realDonaldTrump lmk [let me know] if u need any breakup advice.”
What’s Next
It remains to be seen whether the Trump-Musk feud will continue and if so to what extent it will influence government policy. Trump has not given any indication he think’s Musk’s American citizenship should be investigated and according to Politico the two men are due to speak on Friday.
Update 6/6/25, 7:32 a.m. ET: This story has been updated with additional information.
