Bitter in-fighting has broken out between the tech billionaire Elon Musk and Donald Trump’s hardline Make America great again (Maga) base after the US president-elect chose an Indian-born entrepreneur to be his adviser on artificial intelligence.
The row has pitted Musk and his fellow entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy against diehard supporters including the far-right activist Laura Loomer and Matt Gaetz, the former Congress member and abortive nominee for attorney general. The spat threatens to open up a chasm among Trump’s supporters over immigration, a key issue in his election victory.
Presaging what has been called a “Maga civil war”, Musk went on the offensive after Loomer attacked the choice of Sriram Krishnan, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist, as the nascent administration’s AI policy adviser as “deeply disturbing”.
Loomer, a renowned anti-immigration provocateur widely credited for persuading Trump to highlight false rumors about Haitian immigrants eating pets in last September’s presidential debate with Kamala Harris, criticised Krishnan on social media for supporting the extension of visas and green cards for skilled workers. She said it was in “direct opposition” to Trump’s agenda.
Her comments provoked a riposte from Musk, the Space X and Tesla billionaire who is Trump’s most influential supporter and himself an immigrant from South Africa.
“There is a permanent shortage of excellent engineering talent. It is the fundamental limiting factor in Silicon Valley,” Musk posted on X, the social media platform he owns, on Christmas Day.
In a later post, he wrote: “It comes down to this: do you want America to WIN or do you want America to LOSE. If you force the world’s best talent to play for the other side, America will LOSE. End of story.”
Musk’s stance was supported by Ramaswamy, his partner in the fledgling “department of government efficiency” (Doge), an informal agency Trump claims he will create, under which the two men will be charged with the task of cutting government spending.
In a lengthy social media post, Ramaswamy – the son of immigrants from India – argued that the US was doomed to decline without high-skilled foreign workers and suggested American culture had become geared towards “mediocrity”.
“The reason top tech companies often hire foreign-born & first-generation engineers over ‘native’ Americans isn’t because of an innate American IQ deficit,” he wrote.
“A key part of it comes down to the c-word: culture.
“Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long. That doesn’t start in college, it starts YOUNG.
“A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers. ‘Normalcy’ doesn’t cut it in a hyper-competitive global market for technical talent. And if we pretend like it does, we’ll have our asses handed to us by China.”
The arguments were met by a fierce backlash from Maga exponents, led by Loomer, who delved into racist arguments.
“@VivekGRamaswamy knows that the Great Replacement is real,” she wrote. “It’s not racist against Indians to want the original MAGA policies I voted for. I voted for a reduction in H1B visas. Not an extension.
“The tech billionaires don’t get to just walk inside Mar-a-Lago and stroke their massive checkbooks and rewrite our immigration policy so they can have unlimited slave laborers from India and China who never assimilate.
“You don’t even know what MAGA immigration policy is.”
Ramaswamy’s argument also came under fire from the pro-Trump podcaster Brenden Dilley, who posted: “I always love when these tech bros flat out tell you that they have zero understanding of American culture and then have the gall to tell you that YOU are the problem with America.”
And even Nikki Haley, the former Republican presidential contender and Trump critic whose parents were also Indian immigrants, posted: “There is nothing wrong with American workers or American culture. All you have to do is look at the border and see how many want what we have. We should be investing and prioritizing in Americans, not foreign workers.”
The arguments appeared to portend a battle for the ear of Trump, who has based his political appeal on an anti-immigration message and who, during his first presidency, restricted access to the H-1B visas, arguing they were open to abuse.
But in his recent presidential campaign, the president-elect indicated that he was open to the legal immigration of educated workers, saying he wanted to grant permanent residence status to foreign nationals who graduate from university in the US.
“If you graduate or you get a doctorate degree from a college, you should be able to stay in this country,” he told the All In podcast last June.
Samuel Hammond, a senior economist at the Foundation for American Innovation, said the row flagged up the likelihood of future conflict within Trump’s administration. “It’s a sign of future conflicts,” he told the Washington Post. “This is like the pregame.”