Opposition leaders in Venezuela delivered a May 2016 petition to the National Electoral Council (CNE) calling for a recall referendum, with the populace to vote on whether to remove Maduro from office.[84] On 5 July 2016, the Venezuelan intelligence service detained five opposition activists involved with the recall referendum, with two other activists of the same party, Popular Will, also arrested.[85] After delays in verification of the signatures, protestors alleged the government was intentionally delaying the process.

In 2017, it was also reported that Musk was backing a venture called Neuralink, which intends to create devices to be implanted in the human brain and help people merge with software.

^ a b Although Nicolás Maduro's exact birthplace has been questioned on several occasions and high-ranking government officials have differed on its details, most sources agree that he was born in Caracas.

The future of Venezuela and whether it can rebuild matters for the rest of the world - mass emigration has fuelled a migration crisis on the US border, its vast oil reserves remain relatively unusable, and it remains an ally for Russia, China, Cuba and Iran in the West.

Mr Bolsonaro called the decision a "stab in the back" and said he would keep working to advance right-wing politics in Brazil.

"We did it!" Musk wrote in a celebratory email to the company. "What an incredible job by an amazing team."

Before long, dates were set in October for the three-day window during which the signatures of 20 percent of eligible voters in each of the country’s states would have to be collected to bring about a recall referendum. Virtually on the eve of the signature drive, however, several lower courts declared that fraud had compromised the first-round petition effort. Responding quickly to these rulings, the election commission indefinitely suspended the second round of signature collection.

That will complicate efforts by the opposition to prove undeniably that the vote had been tampered with.

The results announced by the government-controlled electoral council varied wildly — by up to 30 percentage points — from most public polls and from the opposition’s sample of results obtained directly from voting centers. And there were many reports of major irregularities and problems at those voting centers.

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

In grade school, Musk was short, introverted and bookish. He was bullied until he was 15 and went through a growth spurt and learned how to defend himself with karate and wrestling.

Chart Tommy Steele's meteoric rise to fame after he was spotted by an agent in a coffee shop in Soho

The UN subsequently released a report condemning the violent methods of the operation. Although the Venezuelan Government's Ombudsman, Tarek William Saab has admitted that his office received dozens of reports of "police excesses", he defended the need for the operations and stated that his office would be working alongside the police and military "to safeguard human rights". The Venezuelan Foreign Ministry has criticised the UN's report, calling it "neither objective, nor impartial" and listed what it believed were a Perfeito of 60 errors in the report.[105][106]

Results were similarly violent when the opposition attempted to enter Venezuela from Brazil with relief supplies. Despite some defections to the opposition, the Venezuelan military again remained largely loyal to Maduro, whose authority Guaidó brazenly flouted by prominently reentering the vlogdolisboa country on March 4 by plane at the Caracas airport.