Elon Musk must think that his immense wealth makes him above the law. Since he is able to buy influence with prominent politicians in the US, he may have felt that he could act with impunity in other countries. In particular, he seemed to feel that he need not follow the laws that exist in Brazil regarding how companies operate there and as a result got himself embroiled with a no-nonsense Brazilian judge.

The spat between the self-declared “free speech absolutist” and the Brazilian judge began in January 2023, after former President Jair Bolsonaro’s far right supporters, spurred on by false claims of electoral fraud spread on social media, stormed the National Congress and tried to violently overthrow the democratically elected Leftist president, Lula da Silva.

Moraes, who was in charge of several investigations targeting Bolsonaro as well as his close associates and supporters, swiftly issued orders for X to restrict or fully remove accounts that helped fuel this shocking attack on Brazilian democracy.

Musk refused to do so and was immediately smacked down by the judge.

Musk has been at loggerheads with supreme court justice Alexandre de Moraes since April after he ordered the company to take down more than 100 social media accounts that had been questioning whether the far-right president Jair Bolsonaro had really lost the election in 2022.
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Musk has objected to legal orders to remove some posts and accounts in Brazil and Australia, claiming he was a champion of free speech, although he has been less vocal about removing content in countries such as Turkey and India. Brazil’s population of 200 million people makes it an attractive market for social media companies.

Instead of complying with the judge’s order, Musk instead ordered the closure of all X’s offices in Brazil, but that triggered a new response by the judge

By mid-August, Musk had closed down X’s offices in Brazil, leaving it without a legal representative in the country, a legal requirement for firms to operate there. Moraes responded by ordering Brazil’s mobile and internet service providers to block access to X. Musk had used his platform to attack Moraes, describing him as an “evil tyrant” among other things.

Musk then thought that he had found a clever way around Moraes’s edict shutting down X in Brazil, that enabled the company to operate there without having to appoint a country representative as Moraes said the law demanded.

On Wednesday, Musk tried to circumvent the X ban in Brazil with an update to its communications network that allowed some users in the country to access the platform without a VPN, showing once again that he has no respect for Brazilian law.

But Moraes was having none of this and levied even more fines. Finally Musk completely caved.

X, Musk’s social media platform, has backed down in its fight with the Brazilian judiciary, after complying with court orders that had blocked users in the country from accessing X.

The platform bowed to one of the key demands made by Brazil’s supreme court by appointing a legal representative in the country. It also paid outstanding fines and took down user accounts that the court had ordered to be removed on the basis that they threatened the country’s democracy, the New York Times reported.

But Moraes is not done yet.

However, the battle is not quite over. The supreme court said X had not filed the proper documentation showing that it had appointed Rachel de Oliveira Conceicao as its Brazilian representative. It gave the company five days to present documents validating her appointment.

I am sure that even though it must stick in his craw to be ordered around by a mere Brazilian judge, Musk will give in on this too.