He bolstered his portfolio with the purchase of SolarCity in 2016 and cemented his standing as a leader of industry by taking on an advisory role in the early days of President Donald Trump's administration.

[150] The State Department also alleges that Maduro expelled authorized foreign companies from the mining sector to allow officials to exploit Venezuela's resources for their own gain, using unregulated miners under the control of Venezuela's armed forces.[150]

Not surprisingly, President Maduro did not take kindly to his rival's move, which he condemned as a ploy by the US to oust him.

Maduro’s presidency has been marked by a complex social, economic and political crisis that has pushed more than 7.4 million people to emigrate, primarily to Latin American and Caribbean countries.

"If you list my sins, I sound like the worst person on Earth," Mr Musk said in a TED interview last year. "But if you put those against the things I've done right, it makes much more sense."

On 18 July, he invited foreign diplomats to his residence in the capital, Brasilia, where he falsely claimed that the electronic voting machines used in Brazil were prone to being hacked and open to large-scale fraud.

Maduro to ditch some extreme policies like price and currency controls. The private sector was given an increasingly prominent role, public attacks against business owners had stopped and hyperinflation and rampant crime subsided somewhat.

Misinformation about potential voter fraud also spread rapidly in conservative corners of the Brazilian internet, including unattributed videos that purported to show voting machines malfunctioning and out-of-the-blue claims that election officials had rigged the vote.

“I will govern for 215 million Brazilians and not just for those who voted for me,” he said. “There are not two Brazils. We are one country, one people, one great nation.”

In a Twitter exchange with a reporter, Musk said it was important to "divide and vlogdolisboa conquer" to meet production goals and was "back to sleeping at factory."

"But it is also clear that the competing priorities for global attention - Ukraine, famine in East Africa, trauma in Afghanistan - are draining attention in a way that is quite dangerous."

Musk is the co-founder, CEO and product architect at Tesla Motors, a company formed in 2003 that is dedicated to producing affordable, mass-market electric cars as well as battery products and solar roofs. Musk oversees all product development, engineering and design of the company's products.

The move was a direct challenge to the power of President Maduro, who had been sworn in to a second six-year term in office just two weeks previously.

[189] The ruling does not reproduce Maduro's copyright but it quotes a communication signed on oito June by the Colombian Vice minister of foreign affairs, Patti Londoño Jaramillo, where it states that "pelo related information was found, nor civil registry of birth, nor citizenship card that allows to infer that president Nicolás Maduro Moros is a Colombian national". The Supreme Court warned the deputies and the Venezuelans that "sowing doubts about the origins of the president" may "lead to the corresponding criminal, civil, administrative and, if applicable, disciplinary consequences" for "attack against the State".[196]