Since taking office in January 2025, President Donald Trump has implemented a sweeping immigration crackdown, with the H-1B visa program as a primary target. The administration recently raised the H-1B visa application fee to $100,000, marking a significant overhaul of the temporary work visa program introduced in 1990. Amid this controversial fee hike and proposed reforms, it’s notable that several prominent tech and business leaders owe part of their U.S. journey to the H-1B visa. Below is a look at five such leaders who once held H-1B visas.

1. Elon Musk

Elon Musk, the world’s richest individual and CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, is a vocal supporter of the H-1B visa program. Born in South Africa, Musk arrived in the U.S. in 1992 to attend the University of Pennsylvania. He briefly enrolled at Stanford before embarking on his entrepreneurial journey in Silicon Valley. While details of his early visa status remain partly unclear, Musk has credited the H-1B program for enabling him and key figures at SpaceX and Tesla to build companies that have strengthened the U.S. economy, as noted in a CNBC report.

“The main reason I am in the U.S., along with many key individuals who built SpaceX, Tesla, and numerous other companies that strengthened America, was the H-1B visa.” — Elon Musk

2. Satya Nadella

Satya Nadella, chairman and CEO of Microsoft, was born and raised in India and arrived in the U.S. in 1990. Initially holding a green card, Nadella relinquished it to secure an H-1B visa for his wife’s immigration. In a 2017 CNBC interview, he reflected on the process:

“The idea that you have to give up your green card to get an H-1B is, in retrospect, silly. And so therefore let us in fact take the reform so that it works for us, both our security but as well as our competitiveness.”

Nadella has also supported the H-1B program on the Make Me Smart podcast, emphasizing its role in providing high-skilled talent to keep Microsoft globally competitive, while also backing a 2017 Trump administration executive order to review the program for potential abuses.

3. Eric Yuan

Eric Yuan, founder and CEO of Zoom, immigrated from China to the U.S. in 1997 on an H-1B visa sponsored by Webex, a video conferencing company later acquired by Cisco. His visa approval came only after nine attempts, as he shared on the Cloud Giant podcast in 2020. Yuan has praised the U.S.’s welcoming stance on immigration in a 2019 CNBC interview, though he has spoken sparingly about the H-1B program itself.

4. Jeffrey Skoll

Jeffrey Skoll, the first president of eBay and now chairman of Capricorn Investment Group, is a Canadian who held an H-1B visa. After graduating from the University of Toronto in 1987, Skoll moved to the U.S. to attend Stanford University. He received an H-1B visa in 1996, enabling him to work with eBay founder Pierre Omidyar. In an X post, Skoll described the challenges of securing the visa:

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

Skoll has advocated for targeted reforms to the H-1B program while supporting its value.

5. Jayshree Ullal

Jayshree Ullal, CEO of Arista Networks, was born in the UK and raised in New Delhi. She moved to the U.S. at 16 to study at San Francisco State University and later earned a master’s degree from Santa Clara University. Ullal held an H-1B visa during her early career at tech giants like Fairchild Semiconductor, Advanced Micro Devices, and Cisco, as confirmed by a representative to Forbes. Her journey underscores the program’s role in enabling global talent to contribute to U.S. innovation.