Brazil has lessons for Europe on how to handle Elon Musk – ‘cojones’ are required

Elon Musk appears to relish getting into verbal spats with senior political figures who do not share his world view. He is using his social media platform, X, to intimidate and harass them, while refusing to respect the laws and regulations of the countries they govern.

Throughout 2023 Musk called Canadian PM Justin Trudeau a speech censor and an autocrat. He mocked Volodymyr Zelenskyy for relying on US aid and attacked Germany’s immigration policy as having “invasion vibes”. He refused to abide by the Australian e-safety commission requests to address the spread of child abuse on his platform, and ignored a later government request to take down a graphic video showing a knife attack in a church in Sydney.

He assists leaders he likes, who often verge on the authoritarian. But those he doesn’t, he undermines. He uses X like a magic wand to satisfy his whims.

In May 2023, after meetings in Ankara, Musk silenced accounts critical of Recep Erdoğan, the nationalistic president of Türkiye, in the lead up to the elections there. He blocked a documentary critical of India’s prime minister Narendra Modi, on the latter’s request.

Yet for Trudeau, Zelenskyy, and most recently Keir Starmer, it’s open season in the name of free speech.

But in April this year, Musk took on Brazilian supreme court Judge Alexandre De Moraes. And Brazil took the fight right back to him.

Attempted coup d’etat in Brazil

In 2022 Brazil held presidential elections. Right-wing populist Jair Bolsonaro, a vocal Musk admirer, lost to left-wing leader Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. A widespread campaign challenging the results spread on social media and on 8 January 2023 the presidential palace was stormed by Bolsonaro supporters … sound familiar?

Judge Alexandre de Moraes was charged with investigating the attempted coup and the role played in it by Bolsonaro.

In June 2023 the electoral court unanimously voted to bar Bolsonaro from seeking office until 2030, effectively ruling him out of standing in the 2026 presidential election. He was found to have abused his power by making baseless claims about the country’s voting machines just months before the election, which he narrowly lost.

As part of this investigation, the Brazilian government requested that social media platforms hand over all available information, including IP addresses, of those involved in any related illegal activities. Despite the positions he had taken with Erdoğan and Modi, Musk refused to cooperate with government requests, in the name of ‘free speech’.

He ignored all further demands to remove accounts spreading misinformation, incitement to violence and hate speech, including those targeting members of the police who were investigating the attempted coup d’état, and he refused to pay any fines subsequently levied against X.

In an attempt to punish Brazil for ‘censorship’, Musk closed his Brazil offices and fired the staff, including the company’s legal representative. For a company to operate in Brazil, the law insists on a legal representative being in place, and when he was made aware of this fact, he dug in and refused to appoint a replacement.

Musk launched online attacks depicting De Moraes as one of the world’s biggest threats to free speech. De Moraes justified his actions, describing Musk as an outlaw attacking democratic rule, and accusing him of manipulation of the people by spreading misinformation and thus violating the free choice of the electorate.

Musk might have had a mighty megaphone, but De Moraes had the law on his side, the backing of the state, and a strong sense of justice.

Justice, Brazilian style

He did not mess about. De Moraes immediately ordered the suspension of X across Brazilian national territory. What’s more, he instructed that this must be done within 24 hours and ordered that a fine of 50,000 réais per day (approx £6,800) be imposed on anyone attempting to circumvent the order by, for example, using a virtual private network. Not only did he freeze the assets of Musk’s X but also Space X’s Starlink, which has recently exploded in popularity in Brazil. He ordered the transfer of $3mn from those assets to settle unpaid fines incurred by X for non-compliance.

Home to 200 million people, Brazil is South America’s largest country and the world’s fifth largest nation, with an estimated 25 million using X.

And on 30 August 2024, X went dark in Brazil.

21 days later

It took less than a month for Musk to blink.

On 21 September 2024 the company’s lawyers filed a motion confirming that they had complied with all the orders from Brazil’s supreme court. They had taken down the necessary accounts, provided all elements of the information requested, complied with all subsequent legal demands, paid a further $5mn in fines and appointed a new legal representative in Brazil, “in the hopes that the court would lift the block on its site”.

The court did. On its own terms.

JD Vance fires a warning shot

If ever there was additional evidence that standing up to bullies is the right thing to do, it is surely evidenced in the increasingly elusive future US vice president JD Vance’s threat to the EU to leave Musk alone or face potential US withdrawal from NATO. What is he talking about? We cannot be subjected to that level of pettiness. Any US decision to take such a step will have zero to do with X. And if it did, we are better off out of it.

Musk has obtained the wealth of Crassus and definitely political influence, largely owing to Starlink, which has been credited with Russia’s supremacy in the Ukraine war, but he has no legitimate political power.

A South African immigrant (at one point, illegal) he was not born in the USA, and will therefore never be eligible to stand for president. This is his moment. Trump has named him, alongside fellow billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy, to head up the Department of Government Efficiency, DOGE, which Musk probably thinks is really funny because DOGE is also the name of his favourite cryptocurrency, just one of those that he hopes will help to collapse the dollar in the immediate future.

Keep calm and carry on

But DOGE is not an official government department. Departments can only be created by Congress. DOGE is merely an external advisory body which will recommend policy for as long as the president wants to hear it. A sort of duo of unelected bureaucrats if you like – a couple of economic libertarians who are desperate to dismantle the administrative state while they have the chance. And as things stand, they will have that chance as of January 2025.

Musk’s petri-dish fan girl in the UK failed within the lifespan of a lettuce, but with no dissenting voices allowed, or ‘deep state’ as it is known in Truss-speak, the US, as we know it, could well become one of those countries Musk likes to prop up on his Mega MAGA mouthpiece. Or worse.

It’s America, but not as we know it

Since 2016 there have been increasing concerns about the direction the Republican Party has taken. A clear lurch to the populist right with a radical libertarian underbelly. Think Tanks and Christian Nationalists have captured the GOP and where they plan to take America is partly detailed in the document named Project 2025.

In the lead up to the election, Trump tried to distance himself from the document but party funders are heavily implicated in it, as is Vance, who wrote the forward.

Their vision is partly futuristic in tech and AI use, but mostly backward-looking in terms of the protection of the workforce, women’s rights, the LGBTQI+ community and education. A semi-feudal, pre-Roosevelt vision of minimal government, of private cities where workers’ rights and protections will not get in the way of billionaire’s profits, of private money in the form of cryptocurrency which is harder to trace and tax, and which prevents governments adopting wide social spending plans. And a lot of religion.

Since Trump’s election victory, shares in private prisons have soared in anticipation of a much-increased prison population due to public insurrection and internment of those awaiting deportation. This seems hard to digest given that the USA already imprisons more of its population than any other country on the planet including Russia and China.

Choosing another path

At the rate people are fleeing X it could well morph into a version of Truth Social and wither away. That would at least finish what de Moraes started.

We all need to get Brazilian, or some cojones, and refuse to play along with the dystopian billionaire offering that we may well be presented with in 2025 and Britain needs to choose its friends wisely.

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