Javier Milei, the Argentine president, has become the first foreign leader to meet Donald Trump when he flew to Florida for a visit to Mar-a-Lago.

Mr. Milei is to meet Elon Musk in the coming hours where the pair are expected to discuss strategies to reduce government spending.

Mr. Milei arrived on Thursday at Trump’s Florida residence, where Musk has also been holed up for several days, and will be the first foreign leader to personally congratulate Trump on to be re-elected President of the United States.

The brash libertarian economist will also hold informal talks with Tesla, SpaceX and X (formerly Twitter) owners. The pair will talk about their shared interest in reducing public spending and jobs.

Since taking office last December, Milei has done so oversaw cuts to Argentina’s bureaucracyabolishing several government agencies, including entire departments, and firing an estimated 15,000 civil servants.

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 drawing up 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 favorite cryptocurrency, Dogecoin.

But it is unclear whether lessons from Argentina’s recent experience could be applied successfully in the United States.

The South American nation had suffered with an inflation rate of 250 percent – 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 countless subsidies and welfare benefits.

Argentina’s GDP has actually shrunk since Mr Milei first started swinging his axe, although his administration hopes green shoots will start to appear in 2025. However, the US is arguably among the best performers of any major economy, with growth of 2.7 percent and inflation has fallen to 2.6 percent.

Still, Musk’s meeting with Milei may be among his least controversial since joining Trump’s transition team.

Last week he had a conversation between Trump and Volodymyr Zelenskythe Ukrainian president. He also met on Monday with Amir Saeid Iravani, Iran’s UN ambassador, reportedly to discuss tensions between Tehran and the West.

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