On the buddy – Martin Pengelly in The Guardian:

‘Snyder expects that Trump’s soon-to-be home, the White House, will be a stage for uncomfortable and damaging discord between the president-elect and his most powerful ally, the world’s richest man.
“I think we overestimate Trump and we underestimate Musk,” Snyder said. “People can’t help but think that Trump has money, but he doesn’t. He’s never really had money. He’s never even really claimed to have money. His whole notion is that you have to believe that he has money. But he’s never been able to pay his own debts. He’s never been able to finance his own campaigns.
“Musk, with an amount of money that was meaningless to him, was able to finance Trump’s campaign, essentially.” As owner of businesses including Tesla, SpaceX and X (the social media platform formerly known as Twitter), Musk poured millions of dollars into supporting Trump in his presidential election campaign against the Democratic nominee, the current vice-president, Kamala Harris. Musk was widely reported to have been a key influence in Trump naming the Ohio senator JD Vance as his vice-presidential pick.
Since Trump’s victory in November, from Mar-a-Lago in Florida to Notre Dame in Paris, Musk has been constantly at Trump’s side, earning the satirical nickname “first buddy” but also an appointment with the biotech investor Vivek Ramaswamy to jointly head the “department of government efficiency”, or “Doge”, a group tasked with meeting Trump’s wildly ambitious campaign promise of slashing trillions from federal spending.
Considering instances of Musk’s apparent influence over Trump as the president-elect has struggled to control congressional Republicans – an unruly party already split on how to continue funding the government they also want to defund – Snyder said: “All the threats that Trump is now going to issue – ‘I’m going to primary people, I’m going to sue people’ – Musk is going to pay for that, not Trump. And when Trump needs money for anything, he’s going to be asking Musk.
“Unless Trump breaks it off right now, he’s going to be in this kind of dependent relationship for the rest of the way, because you get used to people giving you money … and I think if you were a friend of Trump, you would be worried.”’

Read the article here.

But that’s probably the secret of money. People don’t need money as long as people believe that they have money.

Musk, the shadow-president, I'm not sure.

And Musk will always have Germany.

On the Musk debate in Germany, this article only in German is worth your while.