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Surprise! Donald Trump’s big and bold ambition to buy Greenland from Denmark has a technology angle. Ken Howery, named by the choice of the president-elect of the United States Trump to be the next ambassador to the country (and therefore the main broker of any agreement), is one more part of the rich seam of technological people who cross the next Trump administration.
Part of the original “PayPal Mafia” (he was the CFO who helped bring it together and sell it to eBay), Howery later co-founded the VC company Founders Fund with Peter Thiel and others. He is also a close friend of Elon Musk.
Howery’s decades of experience in technology investing and M&A have brought him close to some of the toughest deals in the Valley. Yet even so, Greenland might be his longest shot.
Simply put, Denmark and Greenland are not interested in selling. I’m also a bit perplexed at the idea of doing so. “We don’t want to be Americans,” the Prime Minister of Greenland Muté Egede he said last week.
Howery was the ambassador to Sweden in the previous Trump administration, but this profile of Howery in the New York Times indicates that it was the long odds here that attracted him to the Denmark job: “The challenge of working on one of the most complicated real estate transactions on behalf of a real estate magnate is one that could lead to Mr. Howery the kind of attention he prefers,” the paper notes.
It is not very difficult to guess what attracts Team Trump to Greenland. Ostensibly, Trump said it was about geopolitics: “For purposes of National Security and Freedom around the world, the United States of America feels that ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity,” he wrote last year past
But … it helps that the Arctic island is believed to have huge and valuable natural reserves of oil and rare earth elements, needed to make batteries and other hardware. And it is cold – very cold. That could make it a potentially key location for building overheated AI data centers. At a time when the United States is looking for ways to be even less dependent on countries like China and Russia for such resources, possessing Greenland, by the logic of Team Trump, could spell security of a different kind. Whether Howery finds enough carrots — or sticks — to get this conversation going, it feels strangely like the stuff of Political drama worthy of TV.
