(Reuters) – Donald Trump met with Tesla CEO Elon Musk, one of the world’s richest individuals, in Florida over the weekend as the former Republican president seeks a major cash infusion for his latest re-election campaign, The New York Times reported on Tuesday.
The Times cited three people briefed on Sunday’s private meeting in Palm Beach but who spoke to the newspaper on condition of anonymity.
According to the Times, Trump met with Musk and a few wealthy Republican donors on Sunday and hopes to have a one-on-one discussion soon with Musk, the CEO of both Tesla Inc and SpaceX, and the owner-executive chairman of X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.
Neither Musk nor Trump’s campaign immediately responded to Reuters’ requests for comment.
Trump, whose own personal fortune took recent hits from judgments against him in a New York civil fraud case and a separate defamation trial, is aiming to line up additional major contributors to his campaign for president, the Times said.
Musk has not said whether he plans to back Trump’s White House bid financially. But the South African-born billionaire entrepreneur has suggested in social media posts that he is opposed to incumbent President Joe Biden, the Democrat who defeated Trump in 2020, winning a second term in November.
With a net worth that Forbes magazine has put at around $200 billion, Musk has the resources to almost single-handedly offset the huge financial advantage that Biden and his supporters are otherwise expected to wield over Trump in the 2024 general election campaign.
Musk has long sought to cast himself as politically independent, and according to the Times has not spent heavily on presidential races in the past, while splitting donations fairly evenly between Democrats and Republicans.
(Reporting by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Editing by Lincoln Feast.)
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