Argentine President Javier Milei has begun a tour of the United States, where he will meet with billionaire Elon Musk as his government seeks a cash injection to revive his country's beleaguered economy.
The president began his four-day tour in Miami, the city where Argentine star Lionel Messi lives and one of the largest populations of Argentines in the United States. There he will receive a tribute from the Chabad-Lubavitch sect of Hasidic Judaism at a local synagogue. Milei will meet with Musk on Friday in Texas, his spokesperson said, where she will also tour a Tesla plant, the businessman's electric car company.
Milei is making his third trip to the United States in just four months in office, at a time when he is restructuring Argentina's foreign policy so that it is in line with that of Washington. She was accompanied last week by General Laura Richardson, head of the United States Southern Command, in the southern tip of South America, Milei promised to strengthen the “strategic alliance” between both nations, highlighting how he considers American support to be vital for the economic reform on which he has based his mandate.
“We take advantage of the opportunity to present a new Foreign Policy Doctrine for Argentina,” Milei wrote on Wednesday on the X social network about his meeting with Richardson. In the same publication, apparently directed at Musk – a self-proclaimed absolutist of freedom of expression – the Argentine president said that he promotes “true freedom of expression” and attacked journalists who criticize his government, pointing out that “no one can avoid Let's talk”.
“We are not going to remain silent in the face of operations, lies, slander, insult or defamation,” he added.
Milei's plan reducing public spending has met with stiff resistance in a country where annual inflation reached 276%. On Wednesday, police forcibly dispersed anti-government protesters who blocked a major avenue in Buenos Aires.
The United States, the largest investor in Argentina, also has the greatest influence in the International Monetary Fund, to which the South American country owes $42 billion. The IMF has backed Milei's extreme measures for Argentina, agreeing to disburse $4.7 billion from a bailout package the country secured six years ago.
The U.S. State Department's report last year on the investment environment cited “capital controls, trade restrictions and price controls” as factors harming investors in Argentina. Milei has promised to reverse these interventionist policies with market-oriented changes that are preferred by business executives like Musk, one of the richest men in the world and director of the rocket company SpaceX, the automotive company Tesla and X, which he acquired in 2022 when It was still called Twitter.
Milei and Musk—both with easygoing personalities and an aversion to excessive government intervention—have expressed mutual admiration. Before her inauguration last December, Milei praised Musk as an “icon of freedom.” Musk was fascinated by Milei's speech in which he attacked socialism at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and posted that it was “very exciting,” accompanying that phrase with a meme of a couple having sex while watching to Milei.
This is a stark contrast to the tense relationship between Musk and Brazilian authorities, who threaten to impose regulations on social media platforms and this week accused Musk of obstruction.
With its enormous mineral reserves, Argentina has a lot to offer Musk, a prominent figure in the automotive industry who refers to lithium—an essential mineral in the manufacture of electric car batteries—as “the new oil.”
Milei's free-market policies have raised hopes in the United States that the mineral and other highly coveted raw materials could be extracted from places closer to the United States, threatening China's dominance in the battery supply chain. President Joe Biden's government said a few months ago that it is exploring investment opportunities around Argentine lithium.
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