Setting aside if Brazil is richer than Musk, his wealth is his stock. He doesn’t have tens of billions in liquid assets and he most likely never will.

So let’s remember that when assuming that billionaires whose wealth is mostly tied up in their company are actually a lot less wealthy and are less able to extract their wealth then the news makes it out to be.

This is true, but neither can Brazil utilise their entire economy against him. Musk could definitely get a few billion out if he really tried (he got a $6b loan backed by Tesla stock and $20 billion in cash to buy Twitter), and the equivalent of that amount back in the day would have been enough to finance a military expedition - the Boer War was at the modern day cost of 25 billion pounds.

I mean if we want to use that yardstick than Brazil has assets worth trillions.

> none of them individually hold $250 billion of assets that they could use against someone

That's not what's happening here though. What's happening is the Brazilian state, through a Supreme Court justice, going against Musk. Not a single individual.