Musk’s endorsement has given many nationalist and right-wing heads of state more international cachet, which they have eagerly promoted as a validation of their policies and popularity.

Musk, Tesla, SpaceX and X did not respond to requests for comment.

India: a Long Game

In September 2015, Musk welcomed Modi to Tesla’s factory in Fremont, California. Modi, a Hindu nationalist politician, had been elected prime minister a year earlier when his Bharatiya Janata Party swept to power, and was visiting the United States to meet business leaders.

Musk and Modi posed for photographs near a gleaming red Model S car. They discussed how “solar panels and battery packs” could power rural regions in India without electrical lines, Musk said at the time.

“I understood his vision,” Modi later said.

It was one of the first instances of Musk’s publicly meeting a nationalist leader. And it was the beginning of a long game between him and Modi, a relationship that took years to develop – and that started paying off for Musk after he bought Twitter.

India is a potentially massive market for Tesla, which needs to expand to new regions to grow. But the country has virtually barred electric vehicles built by foreign manufacturers. In recent years, the tariff India imposes on imported electric vehicles has risen as high as 100 per cent.

Musk initially used traditional personal diplomacy, meeting with Modi and ordering his staff at Tesla to get close to officials.

After Musk bought Twitter in 2022, he had a new lever. The platform is widely used in India – including by Modi, who has nearly 98 million followers – and is a major forum of political discussion.

Musk met Modi in person again last June when the prime minister visited New York. He called himself a “fan of Modi” and said Modi was “pushing us to make significant investment in India, which is something that we intend to do”.

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By then, Tesla employees were again talking to Modi’s advisers about a reduction in tariffs and investment, two people familiar with the conversations said. Rohan Patel, who was Tesla’s vice president of public policy and business development, travelled to India several times, and Piyush Goyal, the commerce minister, visited the Fremont factory in November.

In January, Musk posted on X that India should receive a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council, which would boost its international standing. “India not having a permanent seat on the Security Council, despite being the most populous country on Earth, is absurd,” he wrote.

The timing suggests that Modi noticed. Two months later, India announced it was reducing some import duties for electric carmakers who committed at least $US500 million ($757 million) to produce vehicles in the country. The policy dropped tariffs to 15 per cent of a car’s price from 100 per cent, specifically for electric vehicles that retail for more than $US35,000.

The description fit Tesla to a T. Its Model 3 cars ship at $US38,990.

Brazil: ‘True legend of freedom’

By 2021, Musk was employing a similar courtship to bring his Starlink satellite internet service to Brazil, which was then led by Bolsonaro, the right-wing populist president elected three years earlier. At the time, Starlink was in its infancy, with fewer than 150,000 users across 25 countries.

In October 2021, Fábio Faria, then communications minister and an organiser of Bolsonaro’s reelection campaign, sent a letter to Musk, saying that “Starlink and Brazil can become great partners,” according to correspondence obtained through the country’s open records laws.

Weeks later, Faria visited Musk in Texas. After returning home, Faria pushed regulators to approve Starlink, at one point urging Brazil’s space agency to stay out of any debate about SpaceX’s satellites over the country, he later testified to its Congress.

Brazil’s regulators approved Starlink for operation in December 2021, seven months after the service first applied. It was the fastest of five approvals that regulators granted to satellite internet providers.

Musk later lent a hand to Bolsonaro, who faced an uphill battle in his 2022 reelection campaign.

On May 20 that year, he made a surprise trip to Brazil for a major announcement alongside the president. Starlink was coming to the country, and it would provide internet connectivity to 19,000 rural schools, as well as environmental monitoring of the Amazon, they said at an event in a resort near São Paulo. Bolsonaro gave Musk a medal and called him a “true legend of freedom” for his bid that year to buy Twitter.

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There was just one catch: the plan to connect schools never materialised, said Carlos Baigorri, the chief telecommunications regulator, who helped approve Starlink’s entry into the country. “I don’t really think that it even existed,” he said of the plan.

Musk and Bolsonaro benefited anyway. Musk had entrenched SpaceX in a critical market, where Starlink now has 150,000 active accounts, according to the telecommunications regulator. Bolsonaro’s campaign got to promote the president’s business acumen and cast him as a defender of the Amazon before an election.

Musk’s favour did not prevent Bolsonaro from losing the presidency to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a leftist former president, in October 2022. But within weeks, Musk, who had just completed his deal for Twitter, tried helping Bolsonaro again.

Bolsonaro’s supporters had started pushing accusations on Twitter that Brazilian judges had tilted the election by ordering social networks to remove right-wing posts and accounts. As they camped outside military bases demanding the election be overturned, Musk fed their suspicions by suggesting that Twitter’s former bosses had contributed to Bolsonaro’s defeat.

“It’s possible that Twitter personnel gave preference to left wing candidates,” he posted in December 2022, without citing any evidence. He later wrote that the company “may have people on the Brazil team that are strongly politically biased”.

Argentina: A meeting of the minds

In 2022, one of Tesla’s lithium suppliers announced a $US1.1 billion investment to expand in Argentina. Since then, Musk has taken a keen interest in Argentinian politics – and particularly Milei – leading to one of the most pronounced bromances among Musk’s political relationships.

Milei, a libertarian economist and TV pundit, campaigned on getting the government out of the economy and tying Argentina more closely to the United States. Like Musk, he frequently insults critics, has an intense social media habit and is deeply worried about the threat from “woke” culture.

Days before Milei’s inauguration in December, they spoke directly for the first time, and Musk asked about Argentina’s lithium. In the months since, Milei has been pushing legislation that would make extracting lithium far more attractive to foreign investors.

Milei’s sweeping bill, which would grant him broad emergency powers over the economy and energy for the next year, includes a major benefit for Tesla: significant incentives for foreign investors in large projects, particularly in mining.

Such companies would receive substantial tax cuts, customs exemptions and foreign-exchange benefits, as well as tax and regulatory certainty for the next 30 years. Tesla’s lithium supplier is likely to qualify. If so, Milei’s plan would give Tesla unusual stability and predictability in its access to Argentinian lithium until at least 2054.

The proposal passed the country’s lower chamber on April 30.

Musk has already seen other dividends from Milei. In one of his first acts as president, Milei passed an executive order with 366 provisions. When summarising the highlights of the order in a televised address, Milei mentioned just one corporate brand by name: Starlink.

SpaceX had pushed for Starlink’s approval in Argentina since 2022, but faced a bureaucratic jam. Milei quickly cut regulations on satellite internet, and Starlink began operating there in March.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.