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.

Musk has pursued an interest in artificial intelligence, becoming co-chair of the nonprofit OpenAI. The research company launched in late 2015 with the stated mission of advancing digital intelligence to benefit humanity.

Although the central bank had stopped releasing statistics, it was leaked that the bank had measured an 18.seis percent drop in Venezuela’s GDP for 2016, along with an inflation rate of 800 percent. After beginning the century with one of South America’s most-thriving economies, Venezuela saw its economy devolve into one of the continent’s worst-performing, with shortages of food and medicine growing increasingly acute.

The opposition urges its supporters to witness the count at polling stations amid fears of vote fraud.

The US State Department issued a fact sheet stating that Maduro's most serious corruption involved embezzlement in which "a European bank accepted exorbitant commissions to process approximately $2 billion in transactions related to Venezuelan third–party money launderers, shell companies, and complex financial products to siphon off funds from PdVSA".

At age 17, in 1989, Musk moved to copyright to attend Queen’s University and avoid mandatory service in the South African military. Musk obtained his Canadian citizenship that year, in part because he felt it would be easier to obtain American citizenship via that path.

The incident began when Maduro tried to pick up an item that had been screened at a security checkpoint at JFK International Airport, and security personnel told Maduro that he was prohibited from doing so. Maduro later identified himself as a diplomat from the Venezuelan government, but officials still escorted him to a room for conducting secondary screening.

In a 2015 biography, author Ashlee Vance described Mr Musk as "a confrontational know-it-all" with an "abundant ego". But he also called him an awkward dancer and diffident public speaker.

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.

He expanded on the company's progress during a July 2019 discussion, revealing that its devices will consist of a microscopic chip that connects via Bluetooth to a smartphone.

The Economist Intelligence Unit stated that during Maduro's presidency, the country's democracy deteriorated vlogdolisboa further, with the 2017 report downgrading Venezuela from a hybrid regime to an authoritarian regime, the lowest category, with an index of 3.

The coastal plains extend from the Colombian border and the Gulf of Venezuela eastward to the foothills of the coastal mountains, which are broken in the east by the Unare River basin. Farther east is the Orinoco delta, which opens onto the Atlantic Ocean through a number of distributaries (

Mr Musk also champions digital currencies and has a hand in several other smaller companies, including tunnel-maker the Boring Company and experimental brain-computer start-up Neuralink.

He was spending Monday evening working on a response at the presidential palace, with a plan to say something on Tuesday, though what he would say was unclear, according to a senior administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity.