U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump and X owner Elon Musk praised President Javier Milei’s government in a two-hour interview the politician gave to the businessman on Monday.

Trump referred to Milei as “the new head of a place called Argentina” and a “big MAGA fan.” The pair had a brief, informal meeting backstage at the far-right Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington on February 24. “He came and they bought a lot of hats,” Trump said. 

“[Milei] took it to an extreme, he ran on MAGA,” Trump continued. “And I hear he’s doing really a terrific job. It’s called Make Argentina Great Again. It worked out perfectly.”

Milei, a pro-Trump libertarian economist, used Trumpist motifs during his presidential campaign. Trump described the Argentine’s government as going “pretty well.”

“Inflation’s getting down. You know, they had like a thousand percent and they had inflation like not normal inflation. They had the real deal,” Trump said.

Year-on-year inflation in June was 271.6%, the highest in the world. However, monthly inflation has been falling consistently since December, when prices rose by 25.5%. Most economists attribute the December spike to Milei devaluing the Argentine peso by over 50%. 

Critics argue Milei has had to drive Argentina into recession in order to bring inflation down. Recent estimates put poverty at around 55%, including seven in 10 children.

Analysts say Milei is counting on a Trump victory in the November 5 U.S. elections, and for the new U.S. government to endorse a fresh International Monetary Fund (IMF) loan to Argentina, which is currently undergoing an international reserve scarcity crisis. However, in early August, Trump’s economic advisor Mauricio Claver-Carone, dismissed that possibility.

Claver-Carone was the executive director for the U.S. at the IMF, where he played a key role in unlocking the US$57 billion loan to Mauricio Macri’s government in 2018.

“You have to remember that Milei is not Macri. Macri had a relationship of more than 30 years with Trump. Trump was a partner of Franco, Mauricio’s father. There was trust and a relationship of more than 30 years,” he said in an interview he gave to news website El Observador.

Like Milei, Musk said that inflation is caused by “government overspending” and that the libertarian’s cuts are helping ease the price index.

“Argentina overnight is experiencing a giant improvement. Prosperity,” he said. “But it’s also a lesson for the United States, which is that Argentina used to be one of the most prosperous countries in the world, you know, in the 30s, 40s. And because of bad government policy, it ruined the country.”

Milei has also met with Musk twice, once in April and once in May. “I recommend investing in Argentina,” Musk posted on X after their second meeting.

The interview was broadcast on X, the social media platform Musk bought in 2022. It started late due to technical difficulties, which Musk called “a massive distributed denial-of-service attack against our servers.” 

“[The attack] saturated all of our data lines, like basically hundreds of gigabits of data were saturated,” he explained.