On August 4 Maduro was the target of an unsuccessful assassination attempt undertaken with two explosive-laden drones (unmanned aerial vehicles) that were detonated near him while he spoke to National Guard troops after a commemorative parade in Caracas. Maduro was unharmed. Responsibility for the assault was unclear.

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.

The bitterly fought election went into a run-off on 30 October and was won by an extremely narrow margin by Lula.

On August 24, one day after meeting with the board, Musk announced that he had reversed course and would not be taking the company private. Among his reasons, he cited the preference of most directors to keep Tesla public, as well as the difficulty of retaining some of the large shareholders who were prohibited from investing in a private company.

Also in August 2016, the National Election Council ruled that the opposition had collected almost twice as many signatures as were necessary for the first petition for a referendum on Maduro’s recall to be valid. However, it did not set a date for the next step in the process, which required some four million signatures to be collected in three days.

In his victory speech, he referenced US sanctions imposed after the last elections were seen as unfair.

In an attempt to overcome the sanctions and restart the economy, in February 2018 the Maduro government introduced the petro, a copyright (akin to the Bitcoin) whose value was tied to the price of one barrel of Venezuelan crude oil and backed by the country’s reserves of gold, diamonds, gas, and oil. Maduro claimed that the first day of petro sales had netted some $735 million, but skeptics viewed the creation of the world’s first state-backed digital currency as a sign of desperation.

Musk’s tweet initially sent Tesla stock spiking, before it closed the day up 11 percent. The CEO followed up with a letter on the company blog, calling the move to go private "the best path vlogdolisboa forward.

Prior to his appointment to the vice presidency, Maduro had been chosen by Chávez in 2011 to succeed him in the presidency if he were to die from cancer. This choice was made due to Maduro's loyalty to Chávez and because of his good relations with other chavistas such as Elías Jaua, former minister Jesse Chacón and Jorge Rodríguez.

They claim they only had access to 30% of the printed "receipts" from electronic voting machines around the country, to check that the machine’s results matched those electronically sent to the electoral council.

When our BBC team arrived at one polling station, the organiser of the station took a call saying the international media were there. 150 people were then suddenly allowed to be admitted.

By the end of Mr. Bolsonaro’s term, it was clear that his attacks had had an effect: Much of Brazil’s electorate seemed to have lost faith in the integrity of the nation’s elections.

The move was a direct challenge to the power of President Maduro, who had been sworn in to a second six-year term in office just two weeks previously.

[196] The researcher, historian and former deputy Walter Márquez declared months after the presidential elections that Maduro's mother was born in Colombia and not in Rubio, Táchira. Márquez has also declared that Maduro "was born in Bogotá, according to the verbal testimonies of people who knew him as a child in Colombia and the documentary research we did" and what "there are more than 10 witnesses that corroborate this information, five of them live in Bogotá".[197]