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The Argentinian president also met Elon Musk to discuss strategies to cut government spending
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Javier Milei, the Argentinian president, has become the first foreign leader to shake hands with Donald Trump since his election win.
Mr Milei also met Elon Musk when he visited Mr Trump’s Florida residence, where the billionaire tech entrepreneur has been staying most days while celebrating and planning for the Republican’s return to the White House.
The brash libertarian economist was expected to talk to Mr Musk, the owner of Tesla, SpaceX and X (formerly Twitter), about their shared interest in slashing public spending and jobs.
“The job you’ve done is incredible. Make Argentina Great Again, you know, MAGA. He’s a MAGA person,” Mr Trump told guests at a gala held in the ballroom of his Mar-a-Lago estate on Thursday night.
“And you know, he’s doing that.”
Mr Milei, who first met Mr Trump in February at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington, has openly declared his admiration for the Republican. When he saw Mr Trump on Thursday, he rushed to him screaming “president” and gave him a hug before they posed for pictures.
In a speech during the gala, Mr Milei slammed left-wing ideologies and saluted Mr Musk, saying his social media site was helping to “save humanity.”
“Long live freedom,” he later posted to X alongside a photo of he and Mr Trump with their thumbs up.
VIVA LA LIBERTAD CARAJO pic.twitter.com/O3b7SyMals
Since taking office in December last year, Mr Milei has overseen cuts to Argentina’s bureaucracy, abolishing multiple government agencies, including entire departments, and sacking an estimated 15,000 officials.
Mr Musk, who slashed Twitter’s workforce by 75 per cent after buying the social media platform in 2022, has now been charged, along with Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican tech entrepreneur, with devising similar plans for the US federal bureaucracy.
He and Mr Ramaswamy have been put in charge of a new agency, the Department of Government Efficiency, or DoGE, a play on the name of Mr Musk’s favourite cryptocurrency, Dogecoin. The intention is to strip back on government spending by up to trillions of dollars.
Mr Musk has said staff at DoGE will have to work 80 hours a week without pay.
A job advert shared on X, formerly Twitter, by the new agency read: “We need super high-IQ small-government revolutionaries willing to work 80+ hours per week on unglamorous cost-cutting.”
In what appeared to be a tongue-in-cheek remark, Mr Musk replied to the post by saying: “This will be tedious work, make lots of enemies and compensation is zero.”
It is unclear whether lessons from Argentina’s recent experience could be successfully applied in the United States.
The South American nation had been suffering with a 250 per cent inflation rate – the world’s highest – and is the International Monetary Fund’s largest ever debtor, with a notoriously bloated public sector and an economy distorted by myriad subsidies and welfare benefits.
Argentina’s GDP has actually shrunk since Mr Milei first began swinging his axe, although his administration hopes green shoots will begin to appear in 2025. The US, however, is arguably among the best performing of any major economy, with a 2.7 per cent growth rate and inflation that has subsided to 2.6 per cent.
Yet Mr Musk’s meeting with Mr Milei may be among his least controversial since joining Mr Trump’s transition team.
Last week, he was on a call between Mr Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president. He also met on Monday with Amir Saeid Iravani, Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations, reportedly to discuss tensions between Tehran and the West.
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