While born-again Trumper Elon Musk regularly rails against illegal immigrants, a new Washington Post analysis finds that Musk worked in the US illegally in 1995 when he overstayed on a student visa.

This has been out there rumored for a couple of weeks, but has not received full reporting until this weekend. But we’ll first direct you to a 2013 interview with apartheid-era South African emerald-mine family fortune beneficiary and now Donald Trump cheerleader Elon Musk, in a conversation with his brother Kimball Musk. The younger Kimball discloses in a joint interview with the pair that “When [the investors] did find us, they realized we were illegal immigrants.”

“Well,” Elon Musk laughs, “I’d say it’s a gray area.”

But the Washington Post has dug into the claim, and found that Musk was indeed working illegally in the US in 1995, shortly after he’d moved from South Africa to Canada. Musk arrived on a student visa that year, intending to attend Stanford. But per the Post, Musk “never enrolled in courses, working instead on his startup” Zip2 (which sold for $300 million during the dot-com boom).

The Post unearthed an email in which Musk admitted he knew he was working illegally. In fairness, the investors gave him a deadline to acquire a work visa, which he did. But regardless, dropping out of Stanford would have invalidated his student visa, so Musk was working illegally for a period in the mid-90s, and would have technically been an illegal immigrant.

President Joe Biden jumped all over this at a Saturday rally in Pennsylvania. “That wealthiest man in the world turned out to be an illegal worker here,” Biden said, as the Bay Area News Group reports. “No, 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. And he’s talking about all these illegals coming our way?”

Musk responded, “I was in fact allowed to work in the US. The Biden puppet is lying.”

In reality, enforcement of student visa laws was pretty lax in the days before 9/11. Though as the Post points out, “While overstaying a student visa is somewhat common and officials have at times turned a blind eye to it, it remains illegal.”

And it is ironic, conidering a Bloomberg analysis found Musk to be Twitter's biggest promoter of conspiracy theories against immigrants.

Related: Elon Musk’s Secret List of Twitter Buyout Investors Made Public; It Includes Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs [SFist]

Image: LANCASTER, PENNSYLVANIA - OCTOBER 26: SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk arrives on stage at an America PAC town hall on October 26, 2024 in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Musk has donated more than $75 million to America PAC, which he co-founded with fellow Silicon Valley venture capitalists and tech businessmen to support Republican presidential nominee, former U.S. President Donald Trump. (Photo by Samuel Corum/Getty Images)