Crypto News: America’s new power duo

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These days, if you're a world leader wanting to contact the next US president, you may want to check if Elon Musk will be joining you on the line with Donald Trump.

The billionaire has been named along with entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy to lead a new Department of Government Efficiency to slash waste and regulations. Even before Musk's appointment yesterday he was already redefining the new geopolitical pecking order.

Serbia's Aleksandar Vucic was only too happy to boast that he made Trump's top-15 cut on the same day as Germany's Olaf Scholz — and that the world's richest man was also joining. President Volodymyr Zelenskiy was perhaps a bit surprised to find Musk put on speaker, but given how his Starlink keeps Ukraine online it was unusual but made sense.

Musk's empire is vast — from Tesla to SpaceX — and he is now part of the White House C-Suite. Rarely have business and politics come together so brashly.

WATCH: John Harney discusses the new Department of Government Efficiency on Bloomberg Television. Source: Bloomberg

Leaders of all stripes are scrambling for access to Trump world and now Musk world too — grasping to understand the rules of entry, which are being re-written on the fly and with no particular regard to protocol.

So what does Vucic, who served under Yugoslav strongman Slobodan Milosevic in the late 1990s, have to offer America's new power duo? Serbia is sitting on large reserves of lithium, a key ingredient to batteries used in Musk's Tesla electric cars. Vucic is a strategic European ally to China, which Trump wants to hit with tariffs of as much as 60%, and is also on good terms with Russia's Vladimir Putin.

And as for Scholz? Despite overseeing the world's No. 3 economy, he is seen as a Socialist loser forced into early 2025 elections and part of a dying breed of multilateralists — a "fool" was Musk's verdict last week in an X post. — Flavia Krause-Jackson

Musk at an America PAC town hall in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, on Oct. 26. Photographer: Samuel Corum/Getty Images

The campaign for Germany's early election on Feb. 23 will kick into a higher gear today when Scholz delivers a statement to the lower house of parliament in Berlin setting out his case for a second term. Opinion polls show the center-right CDU/CSU alliance under Friedrich Merz has a big lead with more than 30% of the vote, putting it in a strong position to win back the chancellery after it lost narrowly to Scholz's Social Democrats three years ago.

North Korean troops have engaged Ukrainian forces in combat operations alongside their Russian allies, the US State Department said, after Pyongyang sent thousands of soldiers to Russia's Kursk region to aid the Kremlin's war effort. It's the first time the US confirmed that North Koreans are directly involved in the conflict.

Korean People's Army soldiers march during a rally on Kim Il Sung square in Pyongyang. Photographer: Ed Jones/AFP/Getty Images

Several Russian billionaires see little prospect that Trump will lift sanctions and don't share the Putin government's optimism that the economy will keep growing at a pace most Western countries can only envy. While they don't expect a collapse that would force Putin to end his invasion of Ukraine, half a dozen tycoons interviewed by Bloomberg News said the economy has changed significantly since the fighting started and that makes long-term targets look unreachable.

China's deadliest known act of civilian violence since President Xi Jinping rolled out a sprawling surveillance system killed 35 people and called into question the Communist Party's safety record. A 62-year-old man rammed his small four-wheel drive into a crowd of pedestrians in the southern city of Zhuhai in the latest in a spate of attacks this year that have prompted scrutiny of the government's handling of both security and economic issues.

Carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels are heading for a record this year, further jeopardizing the planet's prospects of meeting a key goal set by the 2015 Paris Agreement to limit the warming of the planet, according to the Global Carbon Budget annual report. There is now a 50% chance that in six years the global temperature will have risen more than 1.5C above the pre-industrial average.

The US sidestepped its own 30-day deadline for Israel to provide significantly more humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip or face a weapons cutoff, saying that progress has been made despite aid groups warning of a looming famine.

Zelenskiy said air-defense forces repelled Russian attacks targeting Kyiv and other regions in the first such assault on the capital in more than two months as his country prepares for winter.

Somaliland holds a long-delayed election today amid hopes in the breakaway region that the incoming Trump administration will back its campaign to gain formal recognition.

The Philippines has protested China's territorial baselines around the disputed Scarborough Shoal, as tensions between the two nations build anew over their competing claims in the South China Sea.

Among the choices that Trump has announced for major roles in his new administration, the most surprising involves the Pentagon. The president-elect said he wanted Pete Hegseth, a Fox News host and Army National Guard officer, to be the next secretary of defense.

If confirmed to the post, usually held by lawmakers, corporate chieftains or former military leaders, Hegseth would take over what's commonly regarded as the world's biggest organization, with more than 770,000 employees and 2 million men and women in uniform. Its budget is more than $840 billion, and its finances are so complicated it's never completed an audit.

In nominating Hegseth, Trump would have a combative loyalist helping spearhead what are expected to be radical changes at the Pentagon, which prides itself on being apolitical. The president-elect has vowed to ban transgender people from the military, strip away diversity and inclusion policies in government, and talked of using the National Guard and possibly active-duty troops to deport millions of undocumented immigrants.

One thing to watch today: Trump meets with President Joe Biden at the White House.

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A Swiss plebiscite to reform the health-care system hangs in the balance as final polls show supporters and opponents essentially tied ahead of the Nov. 24 vote. The reform centers on the question of whether inpatient and outpatient treatment should be funded the same way. So far, only hospitalizations receive support from Swiss cantons, the country's states.

Residents of Zimbabwe's second-biggest city, Bulawayo, are having to cope without piped water for at least five-and-a-half days a week, and there's a high risk the flow may stop completely by the end of the year. A combination of the worst drought in 40 years, a lack of investment and the marginalization of the city in the decades since independence because of political and ethnic tensions have left the authorities scrambling for solutions to the crisis. "We are reaching a catastrophic state," David Coltart, the mayor of the city of 700,000 people, said in an interview.

Residents wait to collect water in Bulawayo's Lobengula township on Oct. 26. Photographer: Zinyang Auntony/Bloomberg

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