“I made it clear and blunt to [Musk] that he does not need to worry about all the nitty-gritty, bureaucratic encumbrances.”
ANWAR IBRAHIM, ON MALAYSIA’S RECENT DEALS WITH TESLA AND STARLINK
ANWAR IBRAHIM has been Malaysia’s prime minister in waiting for decades, only to repeatedly have the rug pulled out from under him. Twice since 1998, the government has jailed him on sodomy charges (trumped up by rivals, Anwar says); in all, he spent 10 years in prison.
It was other people’s financial crimes that helped bring him to power. Anwar and Malaysia’s longtime leader Mahathir Mohamad reconciled a few years ago in order to clean house after the notorious 1MDB scandal, in which investigations revealed that Malaysia’s leaders had been looting a major sovereign wealth fund for personal gain. Last year, Anwar—who ran on an anticorruption platform—finally became prime minister after a snap election that gave no party a majority.
Foreign investment is high on his agenda. Malaysia is no stranger to high-tech manufacturing: The country was home to Intel’s first overseas plant, back in 1972. But the 1MDB controversy and what Anwar recently decried as “a
