Will Indian Tech Billionaires and CEOs in America Lobby to Halt Insults of Indians in the U.S.

Indian billionaires and CEOs in America, unlike those from other ethnic groups, are largely silent about the mis-treatment of fellow Indians in the U.S.

February 7, 2025

“Normalize Indian hate,” Marko Elez posted on X/Twitter last September, in reference to the prevalence of people from India in Silicon Valley, The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this week. This statement was made, the Journal reported, on “a deleted social-media account that advocated racism and eugenics.”

“99% of Indian H1Bs will be replaced by slightly smarter LLMs, they’re going back don’t worry guys,” Elez posted in December, referring to large language models such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the Journal reported.

Elez, according to a report in WIRED, is a 25-year-old who had access to government payment systems “that in their totality amount to more than a fifth of the US economy.” He was working for the new U.S. Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), set up by President Donald Trump, which is run by billionaire Elon Musk. Elez graduated with a degree in computer science from Rutgers University, New Jersey, in 2021. Earlier, he worked at SpaceX, Musk’s space company, and then at X, Musk’s social media company.

When the Journal asked The White House about Elez’s account, it was told he had resigned. But then today, Musk posted Elez will rejoin the department: “He will be brought back. To err is human, to forgive is divine.”

Musk was responding to a post by vice president J.D. Vance: “Here’s my view: I obviously disagree with some of Elez’s posts, but I don’t think stupid social media activity should ruin a kid’s life. We shouldn’t reward journalists who try to destroy people. Ever. So I say bring him back. If he’s a bad dude or a terrible member of the team, fire him for that.”

“I’m with the vice president,” Trump said, when asked about Elez during a news conference, NBCNews reported.

Ro Khanna is a Democrat in the U.S. House of Representatives, representing part of California’s Silicon Valley, where several thousand Indians are employed. In a post on X, Khanna notes that both his and vice president Vance’s children share an Indian heritage. Vance's wife, Usha, is the daughter of Indian immigrants.

Referring to Elez’s post against Indians, Khanna asked Vance, “Are you going to tell him (Elez) to apologize for saying ‘Normalize Indian hate’ before this rehire? Just asking for the sake of both of our kids.”

Meanwhile in India, there is growing public anger, inlcuding protests by opposition members of parliament, over the insulting treatment of illegal Indians by the Trump Administration. The deportation of the first batch of 104 Indians, including women and children, in leg shackles and hand cuffs on a U.S. military aircraft, “presented a humiliating” sight to Indians, E.A.S. Sarma, a former senior Indian government official, wrote in a letter to India’s Minister of External Affairs.

Sarma added, “Talented Indians, both domestic technical personnel and those resident in the US, have contributed immensely to the US economy. While the US has unhesitatingly taken advantage of this, it should not mean that it could subject” Indians to humiliation. Also, many U.S. companies, especially those in media and social media, critically depend “on the vast market of India.”

There are dozens of Indians who have founded major technology firms in the U.S., which have made some of them billionaires. There are also numerous Indian chief executives of major U.S. companies, including giant technology companies, many of them centi-millionaires.

So far there are no statements or any other public efforts, by any Indian billionaire or CEO in the U.S., asking the Trump administration to treat their fellow Indian immigrants, even if illegal, with respect, or, demand an apology from Elez for his remarks against Indians. Perhaps, some of them will say they are lobbying Trump in private. But, even if true, there are no results thus far.

(Photo: Indians waiting in line to apply for jobs. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.)

In the 1968 Hollywood comedy, The Party, Peter Sellers plays the role of Hrundi V. Bakshi, a bumbling Indian actor who speaks with a strong Hindi accent. The movie was shown in theaters in some major Indian cities, including at Sterling in Mumbai. Reportedly, the predecessor organization of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) protested against the comic depiction of Indians and sought a ban on the film in India.

The BJP, which now rules India, has been largely silent on the shackling of Indians deported by the U.S. After days of silence, an official in BJP Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government said today that it has “registered its concerns” with the Trump Administration. So far there has been no public response by the BJP or the Modi government about the Trump administration apparently ignoring Elez’s racist remarks against Indians.

Prime Minister Modi is to meet President Trump in Washington DC next week. "There is an obvious convergence of interests between the two countries in a number of areas -- trade, investment, technology, defence cooperation, counterterrorism, Indo-Pacific security, and of course, people-to-people relations," Indian Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri said today at a special press briefing on Modi’s visit.

"The 5.4 million-strong Indian community in the US and the more than 3,50,000 students from India who are pursuing studies in universities strengthen” the bond between India and the U.S., Misri added.

Most Indians take on $100,000 or more in loans, using their family home as collateral, to pay for their education in the U.S. But there is only a one in fifteen chance of them finding a H-1B work visa in the U.S., after graduation. Some, who do not find work visas, stay on illegally in the U.S. Most, who return to India, are likely to be unable to repay their debt, risking losing their family homes to the banks which made the loans.

In addition, there are more than 725,000 Indians who are in the U.S. illegally, the second largest after Mexicans and Salvadoreans, according to a 2024 Pew Research report. Successive governments in India have not generated adequate employment for millions of youth, with some of the unemployed forced to seek jobs outside the country, says former Indian official Sarma. He adds that the problem, which the Modi government appears to deny, has become so acute that unemployed Indians go “overseas, to be used as cannon fodder in wars in Russia, Ukraine and Israel.”

Pratap Bhanu Mehta is absolutely astonished by the views of significant parts of the ruling establishment in India about the confirmation hearings for Tulsi Gabbard and Kash Patel, President Trump’s nominees to lead National Intelligence and the Federal Bureau of Investigations respectively. In a recent Indian Express column, Mehta, a professor at Princeton University, U.S., and a former policy advisor in India, writes that the ruling Indian establishment welcomes the nominations as the “manifestation of Hindu pride and piety that should matter to India. It should be a comical affectation of little relevance but it is nevertheless revealing: A projection of pride based on some kinship affinity that ought to be completely irrelevant to thinking about India’s place in the world.”

Many Indian citizens in the U.S. voted for Republican Trump in the 2024 Presidential elections, and not for his Democrat opponent Kamala Harris whose mother was Indian. Will such support, and the Modi government’s perception that it has an “important partnership” with the Trump Administration, lead to Trump issuing more U.S. work and permanent residency visas for Indians?

Today, Trump instructed his officials to prioritize “admission and resettlement through the United States Refugee Admissions Program, for Afrikaners in South Africa who are victims of unjust racial discrimination." The Afrikaners, who are Whites of European descent, total around four million; South Africa’s population is 62 million. Elon Musk and venture investor David Sacks, Trump’s Artificial Intelligence and Crypto Czar, were both born in South Africa.

In April 2024, according to The New York Times, while speaking at a fund raiser for his Presidential campaign, Trump reportedly said, “Why can’t we allow people to come in from nice countries…Do we have any people coming in from Denmark? How about Switzerland? How about Norway?”

(Story updated February 8, 2025.)

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