Italy’s Meloni Pals Around With Trump and Their Mutual Friend Musk in Paris

Giorgia Meloni’s friendship with Elon Musk is paying off.

The far-right Italian premiere continued her charm offensive of the MAGA universe, using the opening of Notre Dame as an opportunity to pal around with Donald Trump and their mutual friend Musk.

“I was with her a lot,” Trump told the New York Post after dining with Meloni during a reception for world leaders. “We got along great,” he added, saying Meloni was a “real live wire” with “a lot of energy.”

He was apparently so impressed with Meloni he invited her to his inauguration, the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera reported.

Meloni also seemed to enjoy the president-elect’s company, calling the evening a “pleasant opportunity for dialogue” with Trump and Musk.

Photos of the event posted to social media by Meloni and by Musk’s pro-Trump super PAC “America” show Meloni listening intently to Trump, laughing hysterically with Musk and flashing an awkward thumbs up with the once and future president.

Meloni was elected prime minister in 2022 as the head of the post-fascist Brothers of Italy party. Like Trump, she rose to the top of a conservative coalition by vowing to crack down on illegal immigration.

A year later, she invited Musk to Rome to discuss their shared obsessions: technology, artificial intelligence and falling birth rates.

The world’s richest man was the surprise guest of honor a few months later at the Atreju Festival, a regular political gathering named for Atreyu, protagonist of the fantasy novel and film The Neverending Story, that Meloni founded in the 1990s in Rome when she was head of the local youth wing of Brothers of Italy.

This year, Musk presented Meloni with a controversial award from the Atlantic Council in New York. After photos circulated of the two gazing at one another after the ceremony, the billionaire founder of SpaceX took to social media to clarify that their relationship was not in fact romantic.

But after Trump won re-election in November, Meloni called the president-elect to offer her congratulations—and then wasted no time also congratulating her “friend” Musk, who poured a quarter of a billion dollars into Trump’s campaign.

Meloni is apparently hoping her relationship with Musk will give Italy an outsized role in the U.S.’s relationship with Europe, according to a post on X from Andrea Stroppa, Musk’s right-hand man in Italy.

Since powering Trump back to the White House, Musk has been offered an advisory position cutting waste and eliminating government bureaucracy. An area in which, for all of Meloni and Musk’s shared love of technology and high birth rates, the Italians do not exactly excel.