Elon Musk Completes Transition to Supervillain With Bolsonaro Meeting in Brazil
There’s a lot of scandals hitting Tesla CEO Elon Musk all at once, but at least he knows he has a friend in Brazil’s deforester-in-chief Jair Bolsonaro, a right-wing demagogue who similarly to Musk , has a very hard time taking any sort of public criticism, and has tried using the power of his office to make sure his conspiracies don’t get deplatformed.
Musk’s trip down south was reportedly meant to include talks about internet connectivity within the country alongside concerns of rapid deforestation. The Brazilian Amazon has seen a 15-year high under the three-year Brazilian president, which has scientists concerned it could lead to a total ecological collapse .
While making vague and unconvincing overtures to preserving the Amazon, Bolsonaro reportedly lauded the tech billionaire for his Twitter stance. The Brazilian president told the SpaceX CEO that his planned takeover of Twitter is “a breath of hope ,” adding “Freedom is the cement for the future.” Musk has repeatedly said he doesn’t agree with Twitter account perma-bans, and wants to effectively open up the platform for anybody and everybody to post what they want. The billionaire has proposed incredibly vague ideas for which tweets could require content moderation, including anything that is “illegal or otherwise just destructive to the world,” or just “wrong or bad.”
Bolsonaro, an ultra-right and violent figure who has defended the 20-year military dictatorship of his country that ended nearly 40 years ago, has claimed that companies like Twitter are “left-wing” and are silencing people like him . He has used those platforms to attack the Brazilian electoral system much in the same way former President Donald Trump did for the 2020 election. After Trump was banned, Bolsonaro told his supporters to avoid much of current social media.
