Members of the team close to Elon Musk are developing an ambitious proposal that would allow the United States to offer special visas in exchange for a $5 million investment, an initiative dubbed as “golden cards” by President Donald Trump.
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This plan is a drastic turn from the controversial tasks Musk had been carrying out to cut budgets and dismiss officials through the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
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According to information obtained by The New York Times through documents and sources with knowledge of the project, engineers associated with Musk’s team have been collaborating with officials from the Department of State, the Department of Homeland Security, and the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to design both the website and the application system for these exclusive visas for billionaires.
Trump’s decision to offer this card was seen as a contradiction, as on one hand he makes an effort, even beyond court orders, to extradite Latino and Muslim immigrants, but on the other hand offers residency in the United States to millionaires.
Concerns about the future of DOGE
The initiative marks a new direction for the DOGE group, which has shifted from seeking budget cuts to generating new expenses for this new immigration process.
At the end of February, Trump publicly announced his intention to create a path to US citizenship for “very high-level people,” without providing further details at that time on the selection criteria.
On that occasion, the former president and his Secretary of Commerce, Howard Lutnick, explained that this proposal would replace the well-known EB-5 visa program. The latter grants permanent residency to those who invest between $800,000 and $1.05 million in US companies and create at least 10 jobs. In 2024, that program added approximately $4 billion to the public treasury.
The new gold card, however, would increase the investment threshold by five times, and the requirements are being adapted to significantly reduce processing and verification times.
The decision to assign new functions to DOGE and Elon Musk comes days after various media outlets reported the imminent end of the agency and the departure of the South African businessman. In fact, Trump himself had said of Musk that “at some point, he will return” to lead his companies and that DOGE “will come to an end.”
An accelerated and unprecedented system
The technical leads of the Golden Card project include Marko Elez and Edward Coristine, both part of the DOGE team. Since last month, they have been holding meetings with various agencies responsible for migration and verification processes to study which parts of the current system can be leveraged in this new digital proposal.
According to Lutnick himself, who recently spoke on a podcast, he claimed to have sold 1,000 gold cards, although a source close to the project denied that any payment has been made so far.
During that intervention, the Secretary of Commerce explained: “They pay 5 million dollars, and they have the right to be Americans and to be in the United States, as long as they are good people, are verified, and do not break the law,” adding that many beneficiaries will not seek citizenship but simply permanent residency.
Lutnick also confirmed that Musk is developing the software and that the program will be launched in less than two weeks.
Currently, engineers are focusing on how to speed up the application evaluation process, which will include background checks and interviews, with the goal of delivering residency within a two-week period to multimillionaires.
Controversies among those involved
The project has been controversial since it was announced by Trump and will likely continue due to the profile of the people working with Musk.
Marko Elez was linked by The Wall Street Journal to an anonymous account on X (formerly Twitter) that posted racist messages and promoted ideas related to eugenics in migration policies. Elez resigned in February after the scandal, but both Trump and Vice President JD Vance publicly requested his return.
Since his reinstatement, Elez has collaborated with five government agencies, including the Department of Labor and the Social Security Administration, according to court documents.
On the other hand, Edward Coristine - who goes by the name “Big Balls” on social media - is only 19 years old and was fired from an internship in 2022 by the cybersecurity company Path, located in Arizona, after an “internal investigation for leaking confidential information coinciding with his stay”.
In addition, the project also involves the participation of Airbnb’s co-founder, Joe Gebbia, who joined the DOGE team in February to collaborate on the digitalization of retirement procedures for federal employees, and has since been involved in the development of this new visa proposal.