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.
According to the New York 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 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 New York Times reported.
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.
On Super Tuesday, the biggest day of primaries in the 2024 presidential election cycle, Republican frontrunner Donald Trump dominated the nominating contests taking place coast-to-coast.
Fifteen states held Republican contests, including the two most populous, California and Texas. More than a third of delegates - 865 of 2,429 - were up for grabs; at least 1,215 delegates are needed to win the nomination.
About a third of Democratic delegates will also be awarded in primaries across the country on Tuesday, but President Joe Biden does not face a serious challenge for his party's nomination.
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