Get your free copy of Editor's Digest
FT editor Roula Khalaf picks her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Argentine President Javier Milley is scheduled to meet tech executives including Tim Cook and Sam Altman in California this week, marking the liberal president's fourth visit to the United States in five months as he seeks to raise hopes for economic reform.
The White House said Monday that Milley will be in San Francisco from Tuesday through Friday and will meet with business leaders including the chief executives of Apple and OpenAI, Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
A presidential spokesman said the visit was designed to “reposition Argentina in the world.” The Latin American country's technology sector is one of the largest in the region.
Since taking office in December, Milley has traveled extensively and attracted global attention through his friendships with right-wing figures such as Tesla CEO Elon Musk, whom he met at the company's Austin factory in April, as well as delivering impassioned conference speeches defending his free-market “anarcho-capitalist” beliefs.
By the end of June, he will have completed eight foreign visits — the most ever made by an Argentine president in a six-month period, according to La Nacion newspaper — and never within South America.
Opposition politicians have criticised Millay's trip, with three lawmakers calling for a police investigation into his alleged use of public funds to travel to a far-right political conference in Spain, which they say was done in their personal capacity.
Christian Bouthier, director of polling firm CB Consultra, said about half of Argentines support Millay's government but that for many his global profile was a “new thing”.
“It's something we're not used to seeing an Argentine president become internationally famous. For young voters, a photo with Elon Musk has a certain appeal,” he said. “But the question is, does that fame benefit Argentina or just Millay?”
Analysts said international companies were likely to shy away from investing in Argentina, which is suffering its worst economic crisis in two decades, with annual inflation hitting 289 percent in April and economic activity falling 8.4 percent in March from a year earlier.
Milley has stopped printing money and cut government spending to curb inflation, but he has yet to secure long-term reforms in Parliament, where he controls fewer than 15 percent of the seats.
“Years of an unstable investment environment have led to [badly damaged] “Argentina's international reputation is in decline,” said Kezia McKeag, managing director at McLarty Associates, which advises multinational companies doing business in Argentina. “That's not going to change in six months.”
“There's a lot of excitement in some areas, but companies aren't ready to implement it yet,” she said.
Negotiations are dragging in the Senate over Milley's first two bills, which include measures to reduce the budget deficit and encourage investment in sectors such as mining.
When Musk and Milley met in April, they discussed lithium, a metal essential for electric vehicle batteries — Argentina has some of the world's largest reserves of lithium — but Musk did not announce any new investments, according to the president's team.
The government has also yet to indicate plans to lift Argentina's strict currency controls that limit companies' ability to take profits out of the country, nor has it said whether it will pursue Millay's controversial election pledge to replace the peso with the U.S. dollar.
“There are so many contradictions that it's impossible to make an investment plan,” said Fabio Rodrigues, director at consultancy M&R Asociados. “If I were an investor to meet with Millay, I would want to hear about that, not about socialism, capitalism or freedom.”
