ROME (Reuters) – Elon Musk said on Wednesday he was not having an affair with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, responding to a joke after their mutual praise at a black-tie event in New York this week made headlines on both sides of the Atlantic.
Photos of the two men went viral on social media after Musk presented Meloni with the Atlantic Council think tank’s Global Citizen Award on Monday. The New York Post reported a “public love affair” between the world’s richest man and Italy’s first female prime minister.
“I was there with my mother. There is no romantic relationship with PM Meloni,” Musk wrote on X in response to a post of a photo of the two of them gazing affectionately into each other’s eyes at a banquet table, with the amusing caption, “we all know what happened next.”
In a speech before the award ceremony, Elon Musk said Meloni was “someone who is even more beautiful on the inside than on the outside.” The Italian right-wing leader retorted that the American entrepreneur was a “precious genius.”
Meloni, who split from her long-term partner in 2023, asked Musk to be the person to present her with the award, while the tech businessman travelled to Italy twice last year to meet the Italian leader – in June and December.
(Reporting by Crispian Balmer, editing by Peter Graff)
