Surprise! Donald Trump’s big, bold ambition to buy Greenland from Denmark has a technological angle. Ken Howery, named as the US President-elect to be the next ambassador to the country (and therefore the main broker of any deal), is another part of the rich bunch of tech people running through the incoming Trump administration.
Part of the original “PayPal Mafia” (he was the CFO who helped put it together and sell it on eBay), Howery went on to found the famed VC firm Founders Fund with Peter Thiel and others. He is also a close friend of Elon Musk.
Howery’s decades of experience in technology investments and mergers and acquisitions have brought him close to some of the toughest deals in the Valley. However, even so, Greenland may be his furthest shot yet.
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 Muté Egede he said last week.
Howery was ambassador to Sweden in the previous Trump administration, but this profile of Howery in the New York Times points out that it was the great possibilities here that attracted him to the job in Denmark: “The challenge of working on one of the most complex real estate transactions on behalf of a real estate magnate is one that could bring Mr. . Howery the kind of attention he prefers,” the newspaper notes.
It is not too difficult to guess what attracts the Trump team to Greenland. Ostensibly, Trump said it was about geopolitics: “For purposes of National Security and Liberty throughout the world, the United States of America believes that ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity,” he wrote last year.
But it helps that the Arctic island is believed to have vast, valuable natural reserves of oil and rare earth elements, needed to make batteries and other hardware. And it’s cold – very cold. This could make it a potentially important site for building superheated AI data centers. At a time when the U.S. is looking for ways to become even less dependent on countries like China and Russia for such resources, holding Greenland, according to the Trump team’s logic, could mean security of a different kind. Whether Howery finds enough carrots – or sticks – to keep this conversation going, it’s an awful lot like Television political drama.
