Elon Musk invokes Nikola Jokic and Victor Wembanyama amid immigration debate

Controversial businessman Elon Musk drew some backlash from X users when he recently suggested that the U.S. has to look outside of the country to find some of the world’s top engineers.

“There is a permanent shortage of excellent engineering talent,” he wrote on X this week. “It is the fundamental limiting factor in Silicon Valley.”

He later added more.

“The number of people who are super talented engineers AND super motivated in the USA is far too low,” he wrote in part of another post.

“Think of this like a pro sports team: 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.”

In order to explain how employing talented engineers from other countries can benefit the United States, he made an analogy using two of the NBA’s biggest international stars: San Antonio Spurs big man Victor Wembanyama and Denver Nuggets big man Nikola Jokic.

“Maybe this is a helpful clarification: I am referring to bringing in via legal immigration the top ~0.1% of engineering talent as being essential for America to keep winning,” he wrote on X. “This is like bringing in the Jokic’s or Wemby’s of the world to help your whole team (which is mostly Americans!) win the NBA. 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.”

Going into the upcoming Donald Trump term, Musk is expected to lead the Department of Government Efficiency along with Republican politician Vivek Ramaswamy. The department hopes to reduce wasteful government spending.

Musk’s comments on acquiring foreign talent are interesting, especially because many see the upcoming Trump administration as being anti-immigration. Trump has vowed to carry out the “largest deportation operation in American history.”

Trump’s soon-to-be border czar Tom Homan also has said that there’s no “price tag” for the mass deportations that are planned and implied that he’s willing to spend as much money as necessary to invest in the country’s “national security.”

In the NBA, foreign talent is only getting stronger. Neither Jokic nor Wembanyama are natives of the U.S., as the former was born in Serbia and the latter in France. But the stars have taken the NBA by storm and have their teams in positions to compete in the Western Conference for years to come.

Jokic is already a six-time All-Star and six-time All-NBA selection, and he led the Nuggets to their first title in franchise history in 2023. He averaged 30 points per game across 20 contests in the 2023 NBA Playoffs, and Denver beat the Minnesota Timberwolves, Phoenix Suns, Los Angeles Lakers and Miami Heat during its path to a championship.

Wembanyama, on the other hand, is averaging a double-double for a Spurs team that’s exceeded expectations to start the 2024-25 regular season. San Antonio is .500 at 15-15 and just two games back of a guaranteed playoff spot. Wembanyama will only get better in the years to come and is expected to evolve into a superstar, if he isn’t one already.