“Why are you demanding so much censorship in Brazil?” A supreme court justice answered that question with a criminal case, then cut X off for more than 20 million people. Moraes had been sending sealed takedown orders and threatening to jail X’s Brazilian lawyer unless the company complied in secret, so Musk closed the local office to keep his staff out of custody. Moraes used that closure to block the whole platform on August 30, 2024. He also fined anyone caught on a VPN 50,000 reais a day and froze Starlink’s bank accounts, a separate company, to collect X’s penalties. The ban lasted 39 days and lifted only after X paid about 28.6 million reais. The US Treasury later sanctioned him under the Magnitsky Act, lifted it that December, and by August 2026 was weighing new ones.