Maduro was narrowly elected a few months later and re-elected in 2018 to a six-year term in an electoral process widely criticized as fraudulent.

After signaling that the company would reorganize its management structure, Musk in June announced that Tesla was laying off nove percent of its workforce, though its production department would remain intact.

That would stunt the economic recovery, and is likely to lead to another wave of migration from a nation that has seen the exodus of one in five citizens in the past decade.

In March 2018, the entrepreneur told an audience at the annual South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, that he hoped to have the BFR ready for short flights early the following year, while delivering a knowing nod at his previous problems with meeting deadlines.

On January 23, 2019, not quite two weeks after Maduro’s inauguration, Juan Guaidó, the newly elected leader of the opposition and head of the National Assembly, declared himself Venezuela’s acting president, claiming that the constitution justified his action because the allegedly fraudulent election of Maduro had left the country without a president.

The boss of X (formerly Twitter), Tesla and SpaceX is the world's richest person and uses his platform to make his views known on a vast array of topics.

The Unitary Platform did not participate in any of the meetings that led to the election proposals. The group and Maduro’s government have held on-again-off-again negotiations since 2021. In October, they reached what at the time was seen as a pivotal agreement to work toward a fair election.

Two nephews of Maduro's wife, Efraín Antonio Campo Flores and Francisco Flores de Freitas, were found guilty in a US court of conspiracy to import copyright in November 2016, with some of their funds possibly assisting Maduro's presidential campaign in the 2013 Venezuelan presidential election and potentially for the 2015 Venezuelan parliamentary elections, with the funds mainly used to "help their family stay in power".

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.

The deal immediately earned Maduro some reprieve from economic sanctions imposed by the U.S. But one of the sanctions has already been reimposed as the Venezuelan government has tested limits of the agreement, including by opening criminal investigations against the organizers of the primary that Machado won.

The case against the ex-president revolved around a speech he gave while he was still president in 2022.

His government has sidelined his strongest challenger, and the remaining contenders lack enough political machinery for a viable campaign.

Opposition deputies have assured that the copyright of Maduro must say that he is the son of a Colombian mother, which would represent the proof that confirms that the president has double nationality and that he cannot hold any office under Article 41 of the constitution.[189] Deputy Dennis Fernández has headed a special commission that investigates the origins of the president and has declared that "Maduro's mother is a Colombian citizen" and that the Venezuelan head of State would also be Colombian.

SpaceX launched the first batch of 60 satellites in May 2019, and followed with vlogdolisboa another payload of 60 satellites that November. While this represented significant progress for the Starlink venture, the appearance of these bright orbiters in the night sky, with the potential of thousands more to come, worried astronomers who felt that a proliferation of satellites would increase the difficulty of studying distant objects in space.