A clash between President-elect Donald Trump’s coalition factions has tested X owner Elon Musk’s commitment to online free speech.

The fight began around Christmas and focused on H1-B visas. The tech sector is widely reported to be one of the largest users of the visa program, and critics frequently say the program is abused to replace American workers with cheaper foreign labor who can not leave the company that sponsors their visas.

More than 700 H-1B visas went to Musk’s electric car company, Tesla, in 2023, Newsweek reports. The outlet also reported that Musk claims to have previously held an H-1B visa and that a score of employees at his space exploration company, SpaceX, have been sponsored by the company for such a visa.

Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are close advisors to the incoming President and have been tapped to lead the burgeoning Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Both the tech sector giants took to social media to say that the country needed more H-1B workers.

“If you want your TEAM to win the championship, you need to recruit top talent wherever they may be. That enables the whole TEAM to win,” Musk posted on X on December 26.

“I am referring to bringing in via legal immigration the top ~0.1% of engineering talent as being essential for America to keep winning,” Musk wrote in another post. “Thinking of America as a pro sports team that has been winning for a long time and wants to keep winning is the right mental construct.”

Ramaswamy made similar points on Musk’s platform.

“Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long (at least since the 90s and likely longer). That doesn’t start in college, it starts YOUNG,” Ramaswamy concurred in a long microblog post. “A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers.”

He added, “American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence” and cited portrayals of smart students in TV sitcoms such as “Boy Meets World,” “Saved By The Bell,” and “Family Matters” to buttress his point. This, he argued, justified bringing in more H-1B workers.

Some viewed these arguments as beyond the tech moguls’ portfolio.

“We welcomed the tech bros when they came running our way to avoid the 3rd grade teacher picking their kid’s gender – and the obvious Biden/Harris economic decline,” Gaetz wrote in a social media post that delivered a veiled dig at Musk, whose son now claims to be a girl. “We did not ask them to engineer an immigration policy.”

Long-time enemies of Ramaswamy, such as Former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, hit back.

“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,” Haley claimed.

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X soon became flooded with scathing denunciations of X’s owner and Ramaswamy, followed by reports that critics of the duo were losing their verification status and were being demonetized.

“Why are so many accounts suddenly losing their blue checks and subscribers??,” LibsofTikTok posted.

The news aggregator AF Post said, “Several prominent X accounts are reporting that their verification badge and monetization has been revoked after criticizing Musk’s pro-mass immigration bent.” The account then showed screenshots of prominent pundits who allegedly lost their verification badges after criticizing Musk and Ramaswamy.

Preston Para, a pundit with 4,000 followers, spoke exclusively to The Dallas Express.

He started with a quip. “If anyone thinks MAGA’s backbone—the real America First movement—is going to sit by while Silicon Valley dweebs, who clearly didn’t get bullied enough, hijack this country, they’ve got another thing coming. I’ll lead an army of twink nationalists to crush these folks like modern-day Alexander the Great.”

Para took a dim view of the tech duo, saying, “Elon and Vivek? Trojan horses with a slick sales pitch. Trump’s greatest strength is his loyalty, but it’s also his Achilles’ heel. He’s trusted snakes before, and it’s on us to ensure he remembers who put him in power—not these tech billionaires or globalist stooges.”

Para found any explanation other than a targeted effort to silence dissent unconvincing. “[The] X Org Public Square was hit while also talking about the HB1 issue? Spare me. It’s an obvious, coordinated takedown timed too perfectly to silence us on HB1,” he added later.

Revoking the privileges of verification, which included greater reach and prioritized listing in comments sections, and monetization, which includes the ability of users to receive a percentage of advertising revenue that helps create from posting content, is not new to X.

When X was still known as Twitter, the platform un-verified Milo Yiannopoulos after he faced media backlash for criticizing the commercially unsuccessful all-female remake of Ghostbusters in 2016.

The action in 2016 was noteworthy because it was the first that the general public would have been aware of. Although the perks of verification were different at the time, it signaled a political usage of a tool that was initially intended merely to verify that a user was who they said they were. The action preceded a total ban that was eventually imposed against the media personality for several years until he returned to the platform after Musk’s purchase.

Twitter subsequently embraced an increasingly censorious social media policy in the late 2010s and early 2020s, which was frequently applied unevenly to those who criticized leftism.

One of the most infamous censorship cases involved Twitter killing links to a New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop in the lead-up to the 2020 Presidential election.

Citing numerous concerns over free speech, Musk purchased the platform in 2022.

Musk reportedly referred to himself as a “free speech absolutist” and later called free speech “the bedrock of democracy.”

The act establishing the H1-B visa program was signed into law by President George H.W. Bush in 1990. The UC Berkley International Office describes the program “as an employer-sponsored nonimmigrant classification which allows persons who are not citizens or permanent residents of the U.S. to work in a specialty occupation for up to six years with very limited exceptions.”

The Office website clarifies that the program is supposed to be restricted to “specialty occupation[s]” [which] means a position that requires specialized knowledge and skills, and at least a bachelor’s degree in that specialty.”

The Department of Labor’s website says the H-1B program is supposed to help employers fill gaps where they might not be able to find native-born American employees with a specialized skill set. “The intent of the H-1B provisions is to help employers who cannot otherwise obtain needed business skills and abilities from the U.S. workforce by authorizing the temporary employment of qualified individuals who are not otherwise authorized to work in the United States,” the government agency says.

There are 65,000 H1-B visas granted yearly, with an additional 20,000 visas available for foreigners with master’s degrees, Mubarak Law explained on its blog. These visas last for 6 years.

A new rule issued by the Biden Administration claims to have “strengthened” the H-1B process and now allows companies to “retain [more] talented [foreign] workers.”

It is unclear what the next administration will do with the program.

“Megyn Kelly asked about highly-skilled immigration. The H-1B program is neither high-skilled nor immigration: these are temporary foreign workers, imported from abroad, for the explicit purpose of substituting for American workers at lower pay,” then-candidate Trump said during his first presidential bid in 2016.

Trump signaled an interest in restricting or eliminating the program. “I remain totally committed to eliminating rampant, widespread H-1B abuse and ending outrageous practices such as those that occurred at Disney in Florida when Americans were forced to train their foreign replacements. I will end forever the use of the H-1B as a cheap labor program, and institute an absolute requirement to hire American workers first for every visa and immigration program. No exceptions,” he added.

Nevertheless, the program endured throughout his first term, albeit new restrictions imposed in 2020.

In the summer of 2024, Trump flirted with the idea of expanding visa access for noncitizen U.S. college graduates.

The Dallas Express contacted X to comment on the allegations that these actions were based on criticism of H-1B visa programs and thus violated Musk’s previous commitment to free speech. The platform did not respond by the time of publication.