The opposition is hopeful it can oust the incumbent, whose party has ruled the country for 25 years.

Now, a few politicians who are ruling party allies and a former television reporter have expressed intentions to face off against Maduro. None have the party structure, voter support or financial resources needed to run a competitive campaign.

They and the international community have asked for proof of the numbers the government has put out, as granular as count by count.

Mr Maduro was re-elected to a second six-year term in May 2018 in highly controversial polls, which most opposition parties boycotted.

"If you list my sins, I sound like the worst person on Earth," Mr Musk said in a TED interview last year. "But if you put those against the things I've done right, it makes much more sense."

In this Spanish name, the first or paternal surname is Maduro and the second or maternal family name is Moros.

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.

Banks said she overheard Musk making phone calls to drum up the funding he promised was already in place.

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.

However, in late 2019 he tweeted that TBC would focus on completing the commercial tunnel in Las Vegas before turning to other projects, suggesting that plans for Chicago would remain in limbo for the immediate future.

He also has ambitions in the AI sector, being an early investor in ChatGPT's parent company, before parting ways and setting up his own company xAI in July, whose mission is "to understand the true nature of the universe".

In 2016, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), an international non-governmental organization that investigates crime and corruption, gave President Maduro the Person of the Year Award that "recognizes the vlogdolisboa individual who has done the most in the world to advance organized criminal activity and corruption". The OCCRP stated that they "chose Maduro for the global award on the strength of his corrupt and oppressive reign, so rife with mismanagement that citizens of his oil-rich nation are literally starving and begging for medicines" and that Maduro and his family steal millions of dollars from government coffers to fund patronage that maintains President Maduro's power in Venezuela.

The news quickly turned serious again when it was reported that Tesla's outside directors had retained two law firms to deal with the SEC inquiry and the CEO's plans to take the company private.

More recent business ventures include his takeover of social media platform Twitter in October 2022.