Pursuing legal action against the person (Elon) and not an unrelated business he owns (Starlink)? Wasn't the entire thing caused by a disagreement over X anyway?
Elon Musk is not in Brazil so action against him would be a waste of time.
Action was against X, and then Musk shut down X's Brazilian office and left outstanding debts. The supreme court evaluates that X and Starlink have same ownership and therefore Starlink (which still has local representation) is being held responsible for X's delinquent debts.
I am not a lawyer so can't comment on legality of this but it's obvious that X's stance on free speech is incompatible with Brazil's legislation on hate speech. My opinion is that X never had any intention to observe Brazilian law, and ran out of options to delay and deflect.
As with all thing Musk I feel like there's a need to separate the artist from the art.
If this happened in a liberal democracy there is due process, you can't unilateraly freeze a corporation account, they would prevent whatever company is in violation of the law from doing business in the country and that's it. If the owner can be charged for wrongdoing you can do that too, and then finally if the owner has outstanding debts to the country you can liquidate their assets to recoup the amount.
This is not what happened here, a company is accused of breaking the law so another company which, beside partial ownership has nothing to do with it is getting its account frozen.
It's weird to see people cheering in the comments for this. If Jeff Bezos gets in hot water with the US government over Blue Origin, should they just freeze Amazon's account?
Elon Musk makes it abundantly clear that he has absolute control of his companies and publicly entangles them (e.g. sending Tesla engineers to audit Twitter).
X was operating in Brazil while being maliciously non-compliant, in a manner obviously directed by Elon.
Ergo, Elon is playing games to operate global companies without complying with local legislation.
I am pleased to see a government willing to put a stop to this madness, and I am comfortable with piercing the corporate veil to prosecute this bad actor who is at the root of public and consistent malfeasance. The US government seems entirely unable or unwilling to offer any enforcement.
> Action was against X, and then Musk shut down X's Brazilian office and left outstanding debts. The supreme court evaluates that X and Starlink have same ownership and therefore Starlink (which still has local representation) is being held responsible for X's delinquent debts.
> supreme court evaluates that X and Starlink have same ownership
They don’t though. And this is obvious even with the most basic web search. To me this looks like political intimidation and retribution by an out of control Supreme Court justice (Alexandre de Moraes). It’s a shame to see Brazil turn into a lawless banana republic.
Legally this is known as "piercing the veil" and if generally reserved for situations like this where someone is attempting to use a corporation to evade responsibility for law breaking.
Am I understanding this correctly? The judge didn't like what X did (or didn't do) so he is making moves against StarLink, which would allow users to potentially bypass the censorship this judge is pushing for.
It's not a question whether the judge disliked what X did or not. They were subpoenaed to block the accounts engaged in anti-democratic speech. Failing to do so, X would have to pay a 2k USD daily fine until they cooperated.
X decided to challenge, Moraes raised the fine to 20k USD daily, they continued defying the order, until they closed the company thinking this is a legal way to circumvent the debt they owe to the state.
Moraes found out that there are links between Starlink and X (Musk), so he decided to go after Starlink instead, blocking their bank accounts until X pays what they owe to the Brazilian state.
Musk owns 79% of voting shares of spacex (but yes, only 42% of equity). I guess it depends on your definition of “owns”, but its not unreasonable to say he owns spacex.
Starlink is widely used in deforestation and mining in Brazil. Elon Musk personally flew to Brazil to promote it (with Balsenero?), despite the predictions that Starlink would be used that way. The political pitch was that schools in the far reaches would use it - that has measurably failed to materialize. Meanwhile, Federal raids on gold mining operations show Starlink transceivers routinely.
The issue is not Starlink. It's that the Brazilian government is too inept and corrupt to tackle illegal mining in its backyard. Many countries have huge landmasses (US, Canada, China, etc.), yet no one gets away with something as brash as illegal mining.
no it is nothing at all like blaming vegetables.. there is no cell phone coverage in the distant edges of inland Brazil.. and cell towers can track users.. Starlink directly enables clandestine communication where that is otherwise not possible.
Directly enabling something doesn’t matter. If the tool is made to only do that, then it does. There are a lot of cases in the US about this. Like Betamax case where the court ruled that just being used for something illegal doesn’t give culpability, it’s necessary to be made specifically to do something illegal.
If starlink specifically added functionality to enable illegal mining then you might have a valid argument.