Elon Musk's Clash With Brazil Escalates

What is going on? Yeah. So this has been ongoing for a while now.

This judge, as you mentioned, Ed, has been trying to get X to take action against certain accounts on the platform, right wing accounts, misinformation, things like that. Ellen, as you know, a self-proclaimed free speech absolutist, is saying, hey, we're not going to do that. We're not going to we're not going to remove these accounts or adhere to your demands.

As a result, he a few weeks ago even shut X's operations in the country. Now the judge is saying, well, you need at least a legal representative here in the country in order to operate. And if you don't appoint one, we will remove the app entirely.

It sounds like he is not going to appoint someone. So now we're in a bit of a standoff here waiting to see is this judge really going to follow through and ban X in Brazil? And this is where Elon Musk's conglomerate of companies suddenly comes to bite him because this judge isn't taking action just at X alone.

That's right. I mean, this is the universe, the Ellen universe, right? And to get to X, the judge is going through StarLink, which is, you know, Ellen's one of Ellen's other businesses.

And so freezing bank accounts there in order to take money for fines that expose. Right. And so to your point, Caroline, this is a great example of where running six different companies, especially in countries where there are adversarial relationships, can really be a detriment to him.

And this was something that when Ellen first bought X was a real concern. Would there be governments across the world that would apply pressure on Tesla or StarLink or something else? Z in order to get to the speech related issues that happened on X?

And we're actually seeing that play out here in Brazil. I know this seems like a very simple, basic question, but what is access footprint in the country of Brazil? Like, do they have a big office with hundreds of people working there?

What are we talking about operationally? Yeah, operationally, I believe it was somewhat small compared to a lot of, you know, certainly where they operate in other countries, like in the U. S.

or even in Japan. I think from a user base perspective, we don't know exactly. There's been I've seen estimates between 20,000,040 million active users there.

My understanding is it's around the third largest market for them from a user base behind the United States and Japan. So, you know, significant for sure. Brazil is a country where, you know, people are very active online, very active on social media.

WhatsApp is huge, their Instagram is huge, their X is huge there. So this is a significant issue for them. I don't know if that usage necessarily translates to a huge revenue driver for the company, but regardless, the optics, you know, and taking a country of such importance and significance in in the world, but certainly in Latin America off of X entirely is a big deal if this ends up happening.

Now, we're used to Elon Musk firing out on his own platform, but he's got some fighting talk for this Supreme Court justice in particular, saying that ultimately he is an outright criminal of the worst kind masquerading as a judge. What sort of implications is this going to have to say, that sort of thing? Well, it's hard to imagine this bridge being rebuilt at any point in the near future, right?

I mean, he's sort of going scorched earth here on this judge. I believe he also posted an image that was created by grok his his eye bot that showed, you know, the judge behind bars basically saying you're going to jail. Right.

I think, you know, when you have someone like Elon who's known to lash out at his competitors, who has almost 200 million followers on X, I mean, these are serious, serious, you know, attacks. Right. And we'll see what's going to happen.

But I think the bridge there is burnt quite, quite aggressively.