4 tech and business leaders who got their start on an H-1B visa

• President Donald Trump introduced a $100,000 application fee for the H-1B visa on Friday.
• Some key US industries, like tech, rely on the program to recruit talent and build their workforce.
• Some prominent tech and business leaders have benefited from the H-1B, including Elon Musk.

For foreign-born engineers and product managers hoping to work in America’s biggest companies, the H-1B visa is a golden ticket to a career in the US.

In recent years, however, the visa program has been bogged down by a lottery system, loopholes such as multiple and fake entries, and long wait times. On Friday, the White House announced a $100,000 fee for new H-1B visa applications, sparking a wave of confusion and panic as companies and workers scrambled to make sense of the order.

The H-1B visa was also once used by some of the biggest names in tech, including the current CEOs of Tesla and Microsoft.

Here are four tech leaders who were on the H-1B visa at one point in their careers and have advocated for more efficiency in this visa program. Representatives for the four executives did not respond to requests for comment from Business Insider.

Satya Nadella

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella arrived in the US in 1988 to attend the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He graduated in 1990 and later received an MBA from the University of Chicago.

In his memoir, “Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft’s Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone,” Nadella said he married his wife in 1992, and they decided she would move from India to live with him. However, her visa application was rejected.

A coworker suggested that Nadella give up his “coveted” green card for an H-1B visa as another way to bring his wife stateside. Nadella applied for the H-1B visa in 1994 and was approved.

“Miraculously, it all worked out,” he wrote.

During his first term, Trump criticized the H-1B program and signed an executive order in 2017 that ordered federal agencies to review and propose changes. That year, Nadella called reviewing the program a “good idea” on an episode of Marketplace’s “Make Me Smart” podcast.

“Every country should look at their immigration policy and, especially in this case, it’s about American competitiveness,” Nadella said.

He added: “At least at Microsoft, when we think about H-1B, it’s mostly about high-skilled labor that allows us, an American company, to be globally competitive.”

Elon Musk

Elon Musk, a strong advocate for the H-1B visa, said that he once held the visa himself.

Musk was born in South Africa and came to the US to study at the University of Pennsylvania in 1992. He became a US citizen a decade later, according to biographies of the billionaire.

In an October X post, Musk said that he was “on a J-1 visa that transitioned to an H1-B.” The J-1 visa is for research scholars, professors, and students participating in programs that promote cultural exchange.

In a set of posts on X in December, Musk defended the H-1B program.

“The reason I’m in America along with so many critical people who built SpaceX, Tesla and hundreds of other companies that made America strong is because of H1B,” he wrote.

“I will go to war on this issue the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend,” he added.

Jayshree Ullal

Jayshree Ullal is the CEO of Arista Networks, a cloud networking company.

Born in London and raised in New Delhi, Ullal moved to the US to study engineering at San Francisco State University and Santa Clara University. She worked at Fairchild Semiconductor, Advanced Micro Devices, and Cisco before her role at Arista Networks.

Bloomberg pegged her net worth at $6.4 billion last month.

“The immigration process is challenging and needs to change,” Ullal said in a 2023 interview with The Times of India. “The time taken for approval of the permanent residence visas has gone up to 5, 10, and 15 years, which is a large chunk of a professional person’s work life. I had got mine approved in one year.”

A representative for Ullal confirmed to Forbes in February that she received an H-1B visa.

Jeffrey Skoll

Born in Canada, Jeffrey Skoll was the first president of eBay.

After studying electrical engineering at the University of Toronto, Skoll attended Stanford University to get an MBA. There, he met eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, who hired Skoll in 1995 as president of the startup.

In a December X post, Skoll advocated for the H-1B visa and praised Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency for proposing changes to the system.

“For me personally it was a life an death fight to get and keep an H1B visa, even though I had come out of Stanford Business School, worked with Pierre Omidyar on the J-1 18 month student work visa while we built eBay from scratch,” he wrote.

“We bring in international students to our top universities, then give them US job experience, then generally we send them back home, even when they have skills that are not readily available from local folks for important roles,” he added.

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