Business Leaders React to Trump’s H-1B Visa Fee

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang expressed optimism about Trump’s $100,000 H-1B visa fee during an interview with CNBC on Monday.

“We want all the brightest minds to come to the US, and remember immigration is the foundation of the American dream. And we represent the American dream,” Huang said in a joint interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

The pair announced on Monday that Nvidia was making a $100 billion investment in OpenAI.

“Immigration is really important to our company and is really important to our nation’s future, and I’m glad to see President Trump making the moves he’s making,” Huang added.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the Trump administration’s introduction of a $100,000 fee to the H-1B visa program was the right move.

“We need to get the smartest people in the country, and streamlining that process and also sort of aligning financial incentives seems good to me,” Altman told CNBC during his joint interview with Jensen Huang on Monday.

Netflix cofounder and chairman Reed Hastings praised Trump’s $100,000 H-1B visa fee, calling it a “great solution” compared to the existing lottery system.

Hastings said in an X post on Sunday that he has “worked on H-1B politics for 30 years.”

“It will mean H1-B is used just for very high-value jobs, which will mean no lottery needed, and more certainty for those jobs,” he wrote.

“Shark Tank” star Kevin O’Leary said the $100,000 fee on H-1B visas would hurt American companies and limit their access to talent.

“Apple, Oracle, Google all started in a garage. They could have not afforded to do this. And all of those companies took advantage of talent they couldn’t find in the United States as they grew,” O’Leary told Fox Business’s “Varney & Co.” on Monday.

“I think what this does is hurt innovation long-term. I agree that it’s going to push these really talented people into other countries,” he added.

O’Leary said that the US government should, in fact, be paying foreign graduates to stay and work in the US.

“Why train them and kick them out? And if they’re available, let’s take them all and not charge a 100 grand. We should give them a 100 grand to come here,” he said.

Ark Invest’s Cathie Wood said Trump’s new H-1B visa fee could be a part of his administration’s negotiation strategy with India.

In August, Trump raised US tariffs on Indian goods to 50% from 25%. He wrote in a Truth Social post on August 4 that this was because India was not only “buying massive amounts of Russian Oil” but also “selling it on the Open Market for big profits.”

The US and India are in the middle of trade negotiations. More than 70% of all H-1B visa holders come from India.

“It’s a negotiation with India. Longer term, I think President Trump and his team want to keep as much innovation, talent, and technology talent as possible in the US,” Wood said in an interview with Bloomberg on Monday.

JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon said the executive order was a rule change that “caught everyone off guard.”

In an interview with CNBC this week, Dimon said he supports “merit-based immigration ” and expects employers who rely on the program to object to the president’s executive order.

“I would beg the president,” he said. “He has accomplished border control, that’s great, I mean, I think all nations want real border control, that helps make a nation, but after that, we should have good immigration,” he said.

A Business Insider analysis earlier this year showed that JPMorgan is a top user of H-1B visas. It ranked first on a list of financial companies that use them.

Royal Bank of Canada’s CEO Dave McKay said the US President’s move to impose a $100,000 fee on H-1B visas is a win for Canada.

In an interview with Bloomberg on Tuesday, McKay called the rule a “material opportunity” for Canada to attract more skilled tech workers. He said the country should capitalize on it to accelerate growth in its innovation sector.

“So from India or from South Asia or from Europe, they’ll say, ‘Well, I can’t get into the US, but I want to move to North America — I’ll come to Canada,'” McKay said.

The RBC chief added that the Canadian government could lower taxes to make it more attractive to launch and grow businesses.

CoreWeave CEO Michael Intrator said that his company, like other tech firms, depends on talented individuals to help “build and drive” technology forward.

“Anytime you add an additional fee to it, it does serve as sand in the gears,” Intrator said in an appearance on CNBC on Monday.

“Some sand in the gears is acceptable. It is going to be the competitive landscape and we will comply with it,” he said. “But it does decelerate access to certain talents.”

In an editorial published in the Financial Times on Wednesday, Michael Moritz, a longtime partner in Sequoia Capital, criticized the H-1B visa reform and how it was announced.

“As usual with the Trump administration, the announcement was chaotic and half-baked,” Moritz wrote. “It was yet another distraction for the management teams of America’s leading companies, already whipsawed by various other presidential edicts.”

“The large tech companies hire foreign nationals because they possess particular skills,” he added. “They don’t do so, as Trump seems to believe, to deprive Americans of jobs or for cost reasons.”

Moritz said that the $100,000 fee will scatter jobs to other tech hubs like Istanbul, Warsaw, or Bengaluru, where engineers are as qualified as their American counterparts.

“Like other Trump schemes, this H-1B caper will backfire,” he wrote.