News Desk
As Elon Musk champions a hardline stance on illegal immigration, an investigation finds his empire has long relied on undocumented labor.
Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and a vocal supporter of Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown, has built his empire on a workforce that includes the very people he now rails against.
A new investigation by Bloomberg Businessweek has revealed that undocumented workers have played a crucial role in the construction of Tesla and SpaceX facilities, despite Musk’s public alignment with Trump’s promises of mass deportations. The workers, employed by subcontractors, say they endured grueling conditions while building Musk’s factories—often for low wages and under unsafe conditions.
Bloomberg spoke with 10 undocumented workers who had been employed at Tesla’s Gigafactory in Austin and a SpaceX site. Their jobs ranged from clearing debris to plumbing and concrete work.
Many worked in extreme heat, with little access to water and few breaks. One of them, Cristy, a 55-year-old Honduran migrant, recalled walking up to 30,000 steps a day in 98-degree weather for $16 an hour. She said supervisors discouraged workers from using water stations to minimize bathroom breaks.
“You come to this country yearning to work to be able to help your family,” Cristy told Bloomberg. “So sometimes, you keep your head down and you put up with situations that you shouldn’t put up with.” Eventually, she filed complaints with OSHA, citing unsafe working conditions and retaliation.
The presence of undocumented workers at Musk’s companies isn’t new.
They were there in 2020, before Musk waded into politics. They were there in 2023, when he donned a black cowboy hat and visited the U.S.-Mexico border in Texas. And they were there in 2024, as Musk publicly embraced Trump’s reelection campaign and positioned himself to lead Washington’s new Department of Government Efficiency.
This contradiction, profiting from undocumented labor while calling for mass deportations, mirrors a broader hypocrisy in industries that rely on migrant workers while demonizing them for political gain. Construction, in particular, is built on immigrant labor. In 2022, an estimated 507,700 immigrants worked in the U.S. construction sector, nearly 40% of the workforce. About 295,400 of them were undocumented, according to the American Immigration Council.
Yet Musk, an immigrant himself, has positioned himself as a key figure in Trump’s America First agenda. He has even faced protests over his own naturalization, having obtained U.S. citizenship in 2002 after emigrating from South Africa. That hasn’t stopped him from pushing a nationalist rhetoric that ignores the realities of his own businesses—and the workers who built them.
