A founding member of the “PayPal Mafia” is the person chosen by Donald Trump to help America take Greenland. Ken Howery, who previously served as the chief financial officer of the online payment app, is also known for his long-standing relationship with two other key members of the aforementioned “mafia”: tech billionaire Elon Musk and Peter Thiel.

Howery, who previously served in the first Trump administration as the US ambassador to Sweden between 2019 and 2021, has been selected as Trump’s new ambassador to Denmark. Trump stated that he wants to buy Greenland from Denmark, even officials from the Scandinavian country have repeatedly said that the the territory will not be sold. Trump, unstoppable, insisted he would do it and said so does not rule out the use of military force to seal the deal.

Howery still needs to be confirmed by the Senate for the role. If he is, he is the task of trying to manipulate an agreement critics considered “crazy.” While Trump is still unclear Why he wants Greenland, it is generally agreed that the territory is significant geostrategic importance. During the Cold War, the US in particular attempted to build a network of nuclear missile launching sites in Greenland for use in a “second-strike” capacity against the Soviet Union. The effort was a closely held secret and, supposedly, the US never existed informed the Danish government it does this.

Howery’s potential involvement in the administration’s new key role is further evidence of the political rise of the PayPal mafia under the new Trump administration. Like most of the PayPal crew, Howery and Thiel were college friends at Stanford. greeted wrote for The Stanford ReviewThiel’s student newspaper, and, together, the two would go on to create Founder’s Fund, the powerful venture capital firm that has backed some of Silicon Valley’s most successful tech companies, including Facebook, SpaceX, and others. .

As far as US State Department officials go, Howery seems to enjoy an unusually colorful social life. In fact, nearly half a dozen times throughout the Times piece, reporters refer to his capacity as “the party.” Howery is reportedly known for his extravagant social outings, including a Halloween party at a castle in Transylvania in 2022, where Thiel and other billionaires appeared. A past times The story from 2022 also says how Howery “threw himself a birthday party in an impressive 19th century castle outside of Stockholm” in November of 2020.

During the pandemic, Musk spent a lot of time living out of Howery’s Houston mansion, and in 2021, he said who hosted a party there where guests were forced to sign non-disclosure agreements. At that party was Joe Rogan (who platform Trump during the election and hosted Musk several times on his podcast), Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, “techno-optimist” doofus Jamie Wheal, and other well-known VIPs, many of whom have ties to the broader techno-libertarian network surrounding Thiel.

we previously reported that the Network State movement—a strange political movement that wants to establish itself privately owned, cryptocurrency-powered cities—also expressed interest in buying Greenland and using it to test its techno-colonization efforts. Dryden Brown, the CEO of the Network State-linked Praxis project, even claimed that the acquisition of Greenland was part of a wider “plan” of his movement. The Network State movement has received significant financial support from Thiel, who also financially supported Trump in his first presidential run in 2016.