The reputed powers of Big Tech, and of Elon Musk in particular, are looming larger than ever in the world’s current political dustups. Shortly after Venezuela’s controversial Presidential election, on July 28th, in which President Nicolás Maduro declared victory, he accused Musk of being the mastermind behind an alleged cyberattack, directed from North Macedonia, which had supposedly targeted Venezuela’s National Electoral Council and prevented it from producing the ballot tallies that would substantiate Maduro’s claims that he won. Maduro said that his government was facing nothing less than a conspiracy led by “the U.S. empire, Colombian drug traffickers, Elon Musk and the extremist and fascist right.”

Musk, via messages posted on his social-media site, X, had made no secret of his lack of affinity for Maduro, calling him a “clown,” “dumb,” and “a dictator,” and after the election he also made clear he believed that Maduro was the loser. There was little evidence, however, of any connection between North Macedonia and Musk, or, for that matter, between either of them and the Venezuelan election. In the days that have followed, an online duel has ensued, in which Maduro challenged Musk, saying, “Social media creates a virtual reality, and who controls the virtual reality? Our new archenemy, the famous Elon Musk.” He added, “Do you want to fight? Let’s do it, Elon Musk. I’m ready. I’m a son of Bolívar and Chávez. I’m not afraid of you, Elon Musk. Let’s fight, wherever you want.” Musk, for his part, posted, “I’m coming for you Maduro! 🚀💣 I will carry you to Gitmo on a donkey 🫏.”

The fracas began on July 29th, when the head of the electoral council, a Maduro loyalist, proclaimed him to be the winner of a new six-year term, with fifty-one per cent of the vote to forty-four per cent for his opponent, a mild, septuagenarian former diplomat named Edmundo González. González’s supporters quickly denounced the results, citing the absence of any publicly shared ballot results from the electoral council. Within days, they backed up their allegations by producing an estimated eighty per cent of the voting tallies from the country’s thirty thousand voting centers. These tallies show González with a two-to-one advantage over Maduro, winning some sixty per cent of the vote to his thirty per cent. Widespread protests had broken out after Maduro declared victory, and there were reports that the regime cracked down hard, sending security forces and paramilitaries into the streets to do battle with protesters. In a video that has circulated widely, Maduro is seen giving instructions to anti-riot police, warning them that the demonstrators were “criminals” who had been trained in Texas, Colombia, Peru, and Chile “to attack and burn,” and that it was vital to bring them to heel.

Though Maduro’s triumph has been backed by a handful of nations—notably Russia, China, Iran, Cuba, and Nicaragua—González’s parallel claim has been backed by the United States and numerous Latin American governments. Perhaps most embarrassingly for Maduro, the Carter Center, which the regime had invited to Venezuela as an independent observer, said in a statement that it could not “verify or corroborate the results of the election,” which “did not meet international standards of electoral integrity and cannot be considered democratic.” In response, Venezuela’s foreign minister, Yván Gil, accused the Carter Center of being an accomplice to an attempted “coup d’état scheme.” Last week, Maduro announced that his security forces had detained more than two thousand people, for whom, he threatened, there would be “no pardon.” The ongoing campaign against the political opposition has been officially dubbed Operation Knock-Knock. Human Rights Watch is seeking to verify the reported killing of twenty-four people since the protests began.

Last week, meanwhile, Maduro and his senior officials stepped up their bluster about a nefarious campaign being waged against Venezuela by Western-owned social media. On August 5th, Maduro singled out the Meta-owned messaging app WhatsApp, which is used by millions of Venezuelans. In a country where nonofficial independent media has been largely stifled under Chavismo—the colloquial name given to the quarter century of political control by the late strongman Hugo Chávez and his successor, Maduro—social-media apps play an important role as a communications lifeline. At an event with a knot of supporters at the Presidential palace, Maduro announced, “I am going to break relations with WhatsApp. Because they’re using WhatsApp to threaten Venezuela and so I am going to eliminate my WhatsApp from my phone forever.” He urged Venezuelan citizens to follow his example, and to use the app Telegram, which thrives in Russia, or the Chinese-owned WeChat, instead.

Moving right along, on August 8th, Maduro announced a decree blocking X for a ten-day period. “X out for ten days!” he announced.

“Elon Musk out!” Beyond the self-serving speciousness of Maduro’s actions, his concerns about Musk’s propensity to meddle in politics and the affairs of nations are not without foundation. Since Musk acquired Twitter, in 2022—and rebranded it as X, a year ago—the onetime libertarian multibillionaire has increasingly propagated far-right viewpoints. He endorsed a post on X promoting an antisemitic conspiracy theory, shared a since-deleted link to unsubstantiated claims involving the attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband, and said that “the Biden-Harris Administration is importing vast numbers of voters.” Musk’s interventions in global politics extend beyond his bully pulpit at X; he has played an ambiguous role in Ukraine, allowing Kyiv to use his Starlink satellite system but opposing the Biden Administration’s policy toward the war. But he has escalated his use of his social-media platform this year on behalf of foreign leaders, including Argentina’s self-described “anarcho-capitalist” Javier Milei and Brazil’s former ultra-rightist President Jair Bolsonaro, both admirers of Donald Trump. Supporters of Bolsonaro stormed the Brazilian capital in January, 2023, after he had spent months alleging that the electoral victory of his rival, the left-wing former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, was fraudulent. Since April, Musk has attacked the Brazilian Supreme Court justice Alexandre de Moraes—who has been central to inquiries into Bolsonaro’s role in the capital attack—referring to him as Brazil’s Darth Vader, and calling for his resignation or impeachment. (Bolsonaro has denied any responsibility for the attack.) At demonstrations, Bolsonaro’s loyalists have carried placards that read “THANK YOU ELON MUSK!”

Since Milei won Argentina’s Presidential election last year, he and Musk have met several times, posing for thumbs-up selfies. They also post on X about their shared libertarian beliefs and faith in unrestricted capitalism. After Milei spoke at the World Economic Forum, in Davos, Switzerland, in January, excoriating socialism and extolling “Western values” and capitalism, Musk posted a meme showing a naked man watching Milei’s speech on a laptop while a naked woman straddles him. Musk wrote, “So hot rn.” After a meeting at Musk’s Tesla factory in Texas, in April—Argentina is the world’s fourth-largest producer of lithium, used in electric-vehicle batteries—Musk posted a photo of himself and Milei and wrote, “To an exciting & inspiring future!” The following month, Milei posted more pictures with Musk and wrote, “LONG LIVE FREEDOM DAMMIT . . . !!!”

In defense of his view that X should be a global forum for unrestricted free speech, Musk has reinstated a number of suspended users. Among them were Trump, who had been permanently suspended by Twitter’s previous managers after the events surrounding January 6, 2021, “due to the risk of further incitement of violence”; the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who had been banned in 2018; and Tommy Robinson, a British anti-Islam activist and a former leader of the xenophobic English Defence League, who was banned from Twitter in 2018. On July 13th, within minutes of the first reports of the assassination attempt against Trump, Musk—who thus far had been coy about his preferences in the November elections—came out and declared himself, posting on X, “I fully endorse President Trump and hope for his rapid recovery.” At a rally earlier this month, in Atlanta, Trump said, “I’m for electric cars. I have to be, you know, because Elon endorsed me very strongly, Elon. So I have no choice.” On Monday, Trump returned to X for the first time in almost a year, ahead of a scheduled 8 P.M. interview with Musk, which began more than forty minutes late, owing to what Musk claimed—in an echo of Maduro—was a “massive” cyberattack. The two men spent the next two hours, as the Times put it, “totally bro-ing out,” while Musk proved an enthusiastic listener to Trump’s usual stump-speech grievances and obsessions: the border, Biden, climate change, strong men. Both men praised Milei, with Trump telling Musk, “He’s great. And he’s a big MAGA fan. You know that, he ran on MAGA”—Make Argentina Great Again—“and I hear he’s doing really a terrific job.” Musk agreed, praising what Milei was doing—“cutting government spending, simplifying things”—and describing Argentina’s economic trajectory as “a lesson for the United States.”