Ken Howery: the tech mogul at the center of Trump’s Greenland ambition

Surprise! Donald Trump’s big, audacious ambition to buy Greenland from Denmark has a tech angle. Ken Howery, named by U.S. President-elect Trump’s pick to be the next ambassador to the country (and thus chief broker of any deal), is one more part of the rich seam of tech people running through Trump’s upcoming administration. 

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

Howery’s decades of experience in tech 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 yet. 

Put simply, Denmark and Greenland are not interested in selling. They’re even a little bemused at the idea of doing so. “We don’t want to be Americans,” Greenland’s Prime Minister Muté Egede said last week.

Howery was the ambassador to Sweden in Trump’s previous administration, but this profile of Howery in The New York Times points out 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 mogul is one that could bring Mr. Howery the sort of attention he prefers,” the paper notes. 

It’s not very hard to guess what is attracting Team Trump to Greenland. Ostensibly, Trump has said it’s about geopolitics: “For purposes of National Security and Freedom throughout the World, the United States of America feels that the ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity,” he wrote last year. 

But… it does help that the Arctic island is believed to have huge, valuable natural reserves of oil and rare earth elements, necessary for the manufacturing of batteries and other hardware. And it is cold — very cold. That could make it a potentially key location for building overheating AI data centers. At a time when the U.S. is looking for ways to be even less dependent on countries like China and Russia for such resources, owning Greenland, by Team Trump logic, could spell security of a different kind. Whether Howery finds enough carrots — or sticks — to get this conversation going, it feels eerily like the stuff of TV-worthy political drama.