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Comment by jowea | Hacker News Reader

It's not 100% Musk owned, so I got curious if the other owners could boot Musk over this, but Wikipedia says ownership is "Elon Musk (42% equity; 79% voting control)". Could Musk be vulnerable to a suit alleging he is unduly benefiting another company he owns instead of the interests of SpaceX?

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What motive does SpaceX have to block X though Starlink? Their assets are frozen, they're operating in Brazil for free.

What motive SpaceX would have to follow the law and distance itself from X? Idk man, maybe a responsible management.

Exactly, if SpaceX obeys the court they can get their assets unfrozen and back to making a profit.

This didn't seem possible to me? SpaceX's assets weren't frozen because SpaceX did anything wrong, they were frozen to penalize the majority stakeholder. Said stakeholder has at this point approximately zero chance of an amicable resolution in Brazilian courts, so SpaceX acting at distance wouldn't get them their assets back.

> they were frozen to penalize the majority stakeholder

I'm no lawyer but from what I gather there's two issues with Starlink, one where they had their bank accounts blocked to make them pay for Twitter's fines, which is highly controversial and they could appeal it, and one where they could lose their operating license for openly refusing the general order to all ISPs in Brazil to block Twitter. If they blocked Twitter and appealed on the quite reasonable grounds that they are different companies they would have a much better chance of returning to normal operations in Brazil.

SpaceX's Starlink assets were frozen before X was banned.

Yes yes but openly flouting the court order to block Twitter is not helping their case. It's being used as an argument to retroactively justify the minister's argument that Starlink and Twitter are part of the same corporate group and therefore Starlink should pay for Twitter's fines.

But this only matters if SpaceX had any chance of a reversed decision from that court, which to my eyes they simply didn't. X is not going less deep in the hole by posting a bunch of confidential court orders.

There is virtually zero chance that a US court would find Elon Musk or any of his corporate entities liable in a hypothetical suit brought by SpaceX minority shareholders alleging some sort of conflict of interest. Brazil is a very minor market for SpaceX, and legal precedents gives very wide latitude to corporate management for these kind of decisions.

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