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Surprise! Donald Trump’s big, bold ambition to buy Greenland from Denmark has a technological side. US President-elect Trump’s pick to be the country’s next ambassador (and thus the chief broker of any deal), Ken Howery, is another part of the rich tech crowd moving through Trump’s incoming administration.
Part of the original “PayPal Mafia” (he was the CFO who helped put it together and sell it to eBay), Howery later co-founded the storied VC firm Founders Fund with Peter Thiel and others. He is also a close friend of Elon Musk.
Howery’s decade of experience in technology investment and M&A has brought him close to some of the toughest deals in the Valley. Nevertheless, Greenland may be his longest shot.
Simply put, Denmark and Greenland are not interested in selling. They are even a little confused by the idea of doing it. “We don’t want to be Americans,” said Greenland Prime Minister Mute Egede he said last week.
Howery was ambassador to Sweden in the previous Trump administration, however this profile Howery in The New York Times notes that it was the long odds that attracted him to the Denmark case: “The challenge of working on one of the most complex real estate transactions on behalf of a real estate magnate is that it would have given Mr. Howery the attention he would have preferred.” – says the newspaper.
It is not difficult to guess what attracted Team Trump to Greenland. Trump apparently said it was about geopolitics: “For the purposes of National Security and Liberty around the world, the United States of America feels that possession and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity,” he wrote last year.
But… it helps to believe that the Arctic island has vast, valuable natural resources of oil and rare earth elements necessary for the production of batteries and other equipment. And cold – very cold. This could make it a potential prime location for building overheated AI data centers. Owning Greenland, according to the Trump team’s logic, could create another kind of security at a time when the United States is looking for ways to become less dependent on countries like China and Russia for such resources. Whether or not Howery finds enough carrot or stick to keep this conversation going, it looks like a scary thing A political drama worthy of television.
