Ken Howery: the tech mogul at the heart of Trump’s Greenland ambitions


Surprise! Donald Trump’s big, bold ambition to buy Greenland from Denmark has a tech angle. Ken Howery, named by US President-elect Trump to be the country’s next ambassador (and thus the chief broker of any deal), is another part of the rich seam of tech people running on incoming Trump administration.

Part of the original “PayPal Mafia” (he was the CFO who helped bring it up and sold it to eBay), Howery then went on to co-found the storied VC firm Founders Fund with Peter Thiel and others. He is also a close friend of Elon Musk.

Howery’s decades of experience in tech investing and M&A have brought him close to some of the toughest deals in the Valley. However, Greenland may be his best shot.

Simply put, Denmark and Greenland are not interested in trading. They were even a little confused by the idea of ​​doing it. “We don’t want to be Americans,” said Greenland Prime Minister Muté Egede said last week.

Howery was the ambassador to Sweden in the previous Trump administration, but this profile of Howery in The New York Times pointed out that the high difficulties here attracted him to the job in Denmark: “The challenge of working on one of the most complex real-estate transactions for a real-estate mogul is the one that can bring Mr. Howery the kind of attention he wants,” the newspaper said.

It’s not too difficult to guess what attracted Team Trump to Greenland. In fact, Trump said it was about geopolitics: “For the purposes of National Security and Global Freedom, the United States of America feels that ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity,” he wrote. him last year.

But… it helps that the Arctic island is believed to have large, valuable natural reserves of oil and rare earth elements, which are needed for the production of batteries and other hardware. And it was cold – very cold. This can be a potential trigger location for building overheating AI data centers. At a time when the US is looking for ways to become less dependent on countries like China and Russia for such resources, owning Greenland, by the logic of Team Trump, could speak to security in a different class. Whether Howery finds enough carrots — or sticks — to keep this conversation going, it feels an awful lot like the stuff of TV worthy political drama.



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