AArgentina's ultra-liberal President Javier Milei met with tech billionaire Elon Musk on his trip to the US. Both agreed that the markets needed to be opened further and the ideas of freedom defended, the presidential office said after the meeting at the Tesla factory in Austin on Friday. “To an exciting and inspiring future,” Musk wrote on his messaging platform X, formerly Twitter.
The Argentine delegation expressed the hope that the entrepreneur would invest in the South American country in the future. Argentina has large reserves of lithium, which is used, among other things, in the batteries of electric cars.
Milei also promised Musk that he would support him in the dispute between his news platform X and the Brazilian judiciary, the presidential office said in a statement. Because Musk had interfered in the investigations against so-called digital militias, proceedings for obstruction of justice and incitement to commit crimes were recently initiated against him. Especially during the term of President Jair Bolsonaro (2019-2022), supporters of the right-wing head of state organized smear campaigns against political opponents and spread misinformation and hate speech on social networks.
Milei and Musk see themselves as ultra-liberals and defenders of free speech. “It was like love at first sight,” the newspaper La Nación quoted future Argentine ambassador to the US Gerardo Werthein, who attended the meeting in Texas. Milei and Musk therefore agreed to soon hold a conference to strengthen free ideas in Argentina.