Summary
Elon Musk faced backlash from his followers on X after advocating for importing “super talented engineers” to address a shortage in the U.S. tech industry.
Musk likened hiring top foreign talent to building a championship sports team and argues that there is a shortage of talented and motivated American engineers.
Critics argued there’s sufficient U.S. talent being overlooked or underpaid, with some pointing to widespread tech layoffs.
Musk dismissed claims of low wages or training gaps, maintaining a need for exceptional engineering talent to advance innovation.
presses X to doubt
In my wife’s home country a salary of $11k/year is considered typical. Some make a lot less, some make a lot more. So a lot of people get by on about 6k/year.
In my state minimum wage is 16/hr or $33,280. Almost all jobs pay substantially more than this, but if all your costs are day to day are food, transport and renting a room with family/cousins/etc you can afford to send $6000 aka $500/mo. It’s way less than rent anyway. $500/mo can trivially feed a family in most of latin america for a month with some leftover. If you have that much a month you can absolutely survive, but don’t expect any luxuries. AC is unheard of. You probably have a tiny portable washing machine for clothes, the kind kids get for their dorms in the US. You hang your clothes out on a clothesline. Electricity isn’t 100% stable, brownouts are common and so is service interruption. Generators are a luxury. You can’t drink the water without boiling it, so everyone drinks bottled.
My wife was more likely to only send $100-200, because even that little makes a major impact and in the US where we are, it doesn’t do very much. $1 goes a lot further in places like, Venezuela, Dominican Republic, Peru, Ecuador, El Salvador and many, many more countries in the Americas than it goes in the US.
When my wife went clothes shopping in the US for the first time she thought Primark was incredibly expensive. They’re known for being very cheap low quality clothes in the US. Still way more expensive than clothes in her home country (aside from the typical imported luxury brands that few can afford.)
At the start of the pandemic my wife’s mom sold their condo in a wealthy portion of their capitol for about $ 40k US. I just bought a condo that is slightly bigger for about 600k.
So yeah, you can X to doubt all you want but I promise you really don’t know what it’s like in the overwhelming majority of countries in the world. It’s impossible to understand if you haven’t even been to a place that doesn’t speak English.
No I get that. I actually had some guy who did comissions for me and I found him insanely cheap. I didn’t understand how he could charge so low for what I was asking, until the bill came and I saw he was in a South American country where the exchange rate basically meant that when all was said and done; 20 bucks from a North American client was like a couple hundred down there.
What I doubt is being able to find any building on American Soil that you can afford the rent on while working minimum wage. Especially since most entry level jobs will actively prevent you from qualifying for full time benefits no matter how much you work.
It is possible but it’s not the quality of life Americans are accustomed to. For example, in this scenario you definitely aren’t living alone, it’s many many people living together with the same mindset.