Elon Musk abandons his fight in Brazil
Elon Musk, who owns X, appears to be finally giving in to authorities in Brazil.
Elon Musk, the owner of X, has finally relented after a lengthy and contentious fight with Brazil’s Supreme Court.
Musk had for months defied court orders to suspend certain accounts the court had deemed a threat to the country’s democracy and to appoint an in-country government liaison.
That defiance led to a nationwide ban on X in Brazil, one of the company’s largest markets.
X’s lawyers said the company would comply with the court’s orders in filings submitted on Friday, according to The New York Times. Brazil’s court on Saturday gave X five days to submit official paperwork confirming it would meet the demands.
It’s a notable capitulation from Musk, who viewed the battle as an ideological one over free speech. Since purchasing Twitter in 2022 and then rebranding it, Musk has fashioned himself as a free speech absolutist. He fired most of Twitter’s trust and safety team and has fought authorities in several countries over efforts to enforce content moderation standards.
That’s how he ended up in a monthlong and expensive fight with Brazil’s Supreme Court. The court originally asked X to remove accounts associated with extremist groups engaging in disinformation campaigns favoring Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s ousted far-right president.
At one point during the back-and-forth, Musk said in an X post that he was lifting the restrictions because “principles matter more than profit.”
Musk posted to X a dozen times on Saturday morning, but did not address the news out of Brazil. The nationwide ban, however, was a serious threat to X’s bottom line.
Former X users have been migrating en masse to some of X’s biggest competitors, like Meta’s Threads. The ban was also a threat to the company’s essential ad revenue.
There was also the matter of the millions in fines.
While X initially agreed to comply with the court’s orders, it later ignored them, so Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes threatened Musk with an obstruction of justice investigation and tacked on some hefty fines for any reinstated X accounts.
The court also started imposing fines on Starlink, Musk’s satellite provider, which initially refused to block X but later capitulated. The court later imposed fines on X of nearly $1 million a day when the platform was temporarily restored for some users last week.
