What the Hell is going on with Elon Musk and Brazil?
He's really trying to take on a country's government, isn't he?
My first introduction to Elon Musk
Years ago, I worked for a sports data company in Katowice, Poland. Don’t worry if you’ve never heard of it; most Europeans, let alone Americans, haven't.
It has a bit of a bad reputation. It’s a mining town, so it’s a bit rough around the edges, as most mining or former mining towns are, but thanks to Poland's economic success since joining the EU, it’s become a bit of a technology and financial hub.
The firm I worked for was established by a Turkish entrepreneur. Because he was a decent lad, he employed (and got visas for) many of his Turkish mates to come and work in Poland.
Why am I giving you these details?
Well, on one of my first days working there, the office was abuzz with excitement because a rocket was being launched in the USA. The Turkish workers were glued to their screens all day, waiting for this thing to launch.
I have zero interest in space rockets, so I just carried on with my work. However, it was obvious that my former colleagues had a major thing for Mr. Musk, who was funding the operation.
PayPal & Tesla<Soccer
I was told he’d been behind PayPal's success and had something to do with Tesla cars. Okay, cool, whatever, I thought. I didn’t really care; I had football to write about.
Fast forward to today, and we all know who Musk is. Thanks to buying Twitter, his meddling in political affairs is so well-known now that it’s just accepted as normality.
At first, we were, well, most of us, all outraged, of course, but when you look at it objectively, it’s not all that different from that most heinous of men, Rupert Murdoch owning a multitude of TV news channels and newspapers where his neo-conservative leanings were spoonfed to his consumers.
Capitalism gonna capitalism, y’know?
Lately, however, Musk’s behavior has gotten weird.
He’s trying to position himself as a bastion of free-speech rights, neoconservative economic policies, and a family man (despite his trans child absolutely destroying him on Twitter every time he tries to do so).
While it’s masked as something to do with free speech, when you look at the facts of the matter, it’s all about money, in particular here, lithium mining.
Brazil v Musk
We can trace back the beginnings of this massive teacup storm to when Jair Bolsonaro, a far-right populist, lost his Presidential re-election in 2022.
Bolsonaro’s supporters, like Donald Trump’s on January 6th, a year earlier, tried to mount a coup.
Thankfully they got their butts kicked, and order was restored, and since Brazil has a better working court system than the USA, Mr Bolsonaro and his lieutenants had to face the consequences of their actions.
Mr Bolsonaro has been banned from politics for a period of time, and his minions have also received various sentences.
This has annoyed Elon. Greatly.
Y’see, Elon thought he would be able to cozy up to Bolsonaro. Bazil has a massive lithium mine in Araçuaí that both Telsa and Chinese eclectic car manufacturer BYD really want to get their grubby mits on.
Had Bolsonaro won, Musk would’ve been all over it.
However, since the failed coup, the Brazilian government has wanted to punish all of those involved in the coup. They’ve asked Musk to ban far-right Brazilian agitators on Twitter—something he’s refused to do.
Which is funny because we know that “Under Elon Musk, Twitter has approved 83% of censorship requests by authoritarian governments.” Read more about that from the Spanish newspaper El Pais here.
Day in court
The Brazilian government then brought Twitter’s local legal representative to court (under Brazilian law, all foreign companies must have a legal representative). What did she do? She quit when the heat came, and now Musk is refusing to fill the position, which is obviously illegal.
Since then, Brazil has moved to ban access to Twitter since Musk won’t ban far-right Brazilian influencers/commentators and won’t fill the legal representative role. Something they’re well within their rights to do.
Musk took to the social media platform to make fun of the Brazilian government’s Twitter ban (Notice how he even calls it Twitter and not X).
So, 22 million registered Brazilian Twitter users are now without Twitter. Bluesky, according to The Guardian, is reported to have gained 500,000 users in the two days following the shutdown.
While he might guise it as defending free speech, we can all see his game. It’s about money and power, the very reason he bought the social media platform in the first case.
Starlink
Musk is trying to appear like he’s fighting back.
His satellite internet service, Starlink, won’t uphold the ban on accessing Twitter. However, according to Euronews, there are only 250,000 Starlink customers in Brazil, so it’s not really about giving it to the man; it’s a PR stunt.
As sure as the day is long, if you follow a political scandal back to the money source, you’ll find out what’s really going on. Musk wants that mine, and we’ve a long way to go before he gives up on it.
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