Minister of the Supreme Federal Court Alexandre de Moraes has frozen Starlink's bank accounts in regards to an ongoing complication between X (Twitter) and the state of Brazil.
It should be noted these are two entirely different companies. Hard to see this as anything else except Brazil having a "rocket man bad"-moment.
Brazil has strong antitrust laws and can determine that different companies with a common major stakeholder are an "economic group". They have had issues in the past with wealthy people controlling multiple companies and creating an anti-competitive market, so they created these laws to combat such a thing.
An internet search with terms such as "Brazil" "CADE" (their regulatory body) and "economic group" will give good results. Here is an article that discusses a 20% threshold of ownership to be considered in an "economic group".
Not saying that Brazil have the good definition but it’s pretty infuriating how in US and Europe, you are pretty rarely accused when your company really misbehaves.
I mean, we may have thousands of cases of companies killing people due to bad decisions and executives are mostly never prosecuted.
The problem is that those other businesses aren't really his. There are too many other people on board. They're also not related businesses. It's one of thing if there's a cabal of companies acting in concert to stifle competition, but these companies are as different as they could possibly be.
Now stockholders should be asking whether going into Brazil is worth the risk because any major stockholder might be punished for their position in an entirely unrelated company. The answer may be yes, it's worth the risk, but the question should definitely be asked.
It's not just Elon who is punished. It's easier to track exposure to Brazil than exposure to any high level official in a company or stockholder who may be punished for activity in another irrelevant company.
Also, imagine we realized that Sundar Pichai also had a major position in Costco. So then we started to crash Costco to make Sundar Pichai direct Google policy. And the stakeholders in both companies who don't care and are just using this as retirement strategy are exposed.
>However, the judge is punishing Elon (the person) via collateral damage to his other businesses
How else is the judge supposed to punish Elon then, if he doesn't live in Brasil? All the judge can do is go after his assets in Brazilian jurisdiction. Yes, 40% of a company is also an asset in many jurisdictions.
You're conveniently leaving out the the part where the CEO is not complying with the court ruling before being sent to jail. Employees, companies and CEOs making mistakes is not the problem, not complying with the court ruling is, that's what tends to get people in jail.
You can differentiate them and still see the relationship. Musk has businesses in Brazil, and needs to comply with local laws. You may agree with the law or not, but you may not claim ignorance of it in order to get away from punishment.
It should be noted these are two entirely different companies. Hard to see this as anything else except Brazil having a "rocket man bad"-moment.