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THE TECH BILLIONAIRES BEHIND TRUMP’S GREENLAND PUSH  
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Lois Parshley
January 14, 2026
The Lever
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_ Today Trump announced 10% tariffs against 8 European countries that
oppose his takeover of Greenland. _

Donald Trump wants Greenland as a gift to his tech oligarch donors,
who would depend on the administration to weaken its restrictions
against both mining and private property. , Lokman Vural Elibol /
Anadolu via Getty Images

 

President Donald Trump [[link removed]]
started his second term with his sights set on Greenland.

When Trump first proposed buying the arctic nation during his first
administration, it was treated like a joke
[[link removed]].
But in a phone call
[[link removed]] last
week with Denmark’s prime minister, who controls the autonomous
territory’s foreign policy, the president doubled down on his
efforts to seize power. In the “aggressive and confrontational”
conversation, Trump threatened tariffs
[[link removed]] if
he didn’t get his way. In a news conference earlier this month, he
also refused
[[link removed]]
to rule out the use of military force. Now Denmark is taking him
seriously: on Monday, it announced a $2 billion
[[link removed]]
military expansion in the Arctic.

Though the island is not for sale, the president emphasized
[[link removed]]
Greenland’s importance to US national security. Left unspoken: a US
takeover could weaken the country’s mining laws and ban on private
property, aiding Trump donors’ plans to profit from the island’s
mineral deposits and build a libertarian techno-city.

Trump, who has summarized his own natural resources policy as
“drill, baby, drill
[[link removed]],” would likely
approach the island’s natural resources quite differently from
Greenland’s current government, which has opposed large extractive
projects.

In 2019, Trump’s ambassador to Denmark and Greenland visited
[[link removed]] a
major rare-earth mining project on the island shortly before Trump’s
first calls to buy the country. Opposition to the mine ushered liberal
political party Inuit Ataqatigiit into power two years later,
which halted [[link removed]] the
mine and banned
[[link removed]] all
future oil development.

The president’s renewed intention to take over Greenland has
reignited debates over its sovereignty, as the country grapples with
the trade-offs between economic opportunity and independence from
Denmark. As the country’s glaciers recede, it’s also facing
sweeping climate-driven transformations, threatening traditional
industries like fishing and hunting and exposing valuable mineral
resources.

These shifts have prompted interest from powerful players associated
with Trump. Tech moguls in the front row
[[link removed]]
of his inauguration, like Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos, are also
investors in a start-up aiming to mine western Greenland for materials
crucial to the artificial intelligence boom.

That company, KoBold Metals [[link removed]], uses
artificial intelligence to locate and extract rare earth minerals.
Their proprietary algorithm parses government-funded geological
surveys and other data to locate significant deposits. The program
pinpointed southwest Greenland’s rugged coastline, where the company
now has a 51 percent stake
[[link removed]] in
the Disko-Nuussuaq project, searching for minerals like copper.

Just two weeks before some of its investors were glad-handing at the
Capitol celebrations, KoBold Metals raised $537 million
[[link removed]] in
its latest funding round, bringing its valuation to almost $3
billion. Among the contributors
[[link removed]] was
a leading venture capital firm founded by Marc Andreessen, an early
Silicon Valley entrepreneur who has helped shape the
administration’s technology policies, including consulting with
Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency
[[link removed]] as
a self-proclaimed
[[link removed]] “unpaid intern.”

“We believe in _adventure,” _Andreessen wrote
[[link removed]] in a lengthy 2023
manifesto that outlined his criticisms of centralized government,
advocating for technologists to take control, “rebelling against the
status quo, mapping uncharted territory, conquering dragons, and
bringing home the spoils for our community.” Connie Chan, a general
partner at his venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, is listed as
a KoBold director in its 2022 Securities and Exchange Commission
filing
[[link removed]].

In addition to KoBold, Andreessen has also backed other ventures
eyeing the arctic nation: he is a significant investor in Praxis
Nation [[link removed]], a project
aiming to use Greenland to establish a “crypto state,” a
self-governing, experimental community built around libertarian ideals
and technology like cryptocurrency.

The venture is also funded [[link removed]] in
part by Pronomos Capital [[link removed]], a venture
capital group founded by the grandson of economist Milton Friedman
and bankrolled
[[link removed]] by
libertarian figures such as Peter Thiel, whose own family reportedly
managed a uranium mine
[[link removed]] in
Namibia. Pronomos aims
[[link removed]] to
create private, business-friendly charter cities like Praxis, often in
developing countries where investors could write their own laws and
regulations.

These “broligarchs
[[link removed]]”
now have the ear of the president. Thiel has been a significant
supporter of Trump, throwing
[[link removed]] millions
[[link removed]] of
dollars behind him throughout his political career and introducing
him
[[link removed]]
to current Vice President J. D. Vance.

Most notable, in December, Trump announced
[[link removed]] Thiel’s
partner Ken Howery as his Danish ambassador, making his intentions
explicitly clear: “The United States of America feels that the
ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity,” he
wrote on TruthSocial, his social media platform.

Greenland’s prime minister Múte Egede flatly rejected the idea,
responding [[link removed]] on
Facebook, “Greenland is ours. We are not for sale and will never be
for sale. We must not lose our long struggle for freedom.”

When the Price Is Too High

For centuries, the fight to control Greenland has revolved around its
natural resources. The ice-gripped country has been part of Denmark
since 1721 when a merchant-backed missionary expedition sought to
spread Christianity to its Inuit population — and expand whaling
[[link removed]] and
trade routes.

Greenland gained autonomy from Denmark in 1979, though the Danes
continued to control its foreign relations and defense, allowing the
United States to build and operate military bases there. In a 2008
referendum, Greenlanders voted for greater independence
[[link removed]],
allowing them to take control of their natural resources along with
other state functions.

That same year, the US Geological Survey found
[[link removed]] the country had one of the
world’s largest potential oil and gas reserves. More recent
estimates suggest that the Arctic could hold
[[link removed]] 13 percent of
the world’s undiscovered oil and 30 percent of its undiscovered
natural gas. The report drew the attention of major oil companies
like ConocoPhillips
[[link removed]],
Chevron, and BP, which began acquiring exploration licenses and
conducting surveys around Greenland and its offshore areas.

But producing oil in such harsh conditions is difficult and expensive
due to high transportation costs and infrastructure limitations.
ExxonMobil, for example, withdrew
[[link removed]]
its application in 2013, as a downward trend in oil prices made
further development economically unfeasible.

When Siumut, a pro-independence political party, came into power
earlier that year, leader Aleqa Hammond declared the country would
instead transition to mineral extraction, saying
[[link removed]],
“If we want greater autonomy from Denmark, we have to finance it
ourselves. This means finding new sources of income.” In 2014, the
government announced a four-year national plan to create
[[link removed]] “new
income and employment opportunities in the area of mineral resources
activities.”

Because Greenland’s vast mineral deposits often contain uranium,
however, the burgeoning mining industry quickly came into conflict
with Denmark’s strict policy against extracting radioactive
materials. Denmark chose not
[[link removed]] to
develop nuclear energy in the 1980s, and has comparatively strict
regulations
[[link removed]] around
radiation protections.

One of the measures the Siumut-led government took in 2014 was
proposing a bill that would have limited
[[link removed]] public
access to environmental information and decision-making processes
around mineral extraction. It also lowered
[[link removed]] environmental
standards for uranium mining.

The bill failed
[[link removed]]
to pass, but with Siumut’s support, an international project hoping
to extract uranium and rare-earth metals gained preliminary approval
[[link removed]].
The Australian-based company Greenland Minerals (now called Energy
Transition Minerals) found backing from Chinese Shenghe Resources
Holdings, and brought
[[link removed]]
Trump’s Greenland ambassador Carla Sands to the site for a visit
[[link removed]] in
July 2019. The following month, Trump announced he wanted to buy the
island, comparing
[[link removed]] it
to “a large real estate deal.”

Sands, a former chiropractor
[[link removed]] and soap opera actress
[[link removed]], now works
for the America First Policy Institute, a conservative think tank
concerned with strengthening
[[link removed]]
the US mineral supply chains, among other nationalist issues.

Energy Transition Minerals’ proposed mine triggered massive
controversy: concerns over the potential impact on critical fishing
industries and food supplies ushered the Siumut party out of decades
of power in 2021. “There is an ongoing, generational dialectic,”
says Barry Zellen, a senior fellow of Arctic Security at the Institute
of the North, between pro-development and pro-subsistence movements
“that tends to swing pendularly.”

As the more left-leaning Inuit Ataqatigiit party took over, it quickly
passed a law reinstating
[[link removed]] limits around uranium that
revoked Energy Transition Minerals’ permits and banned
[[link removed]] all
future oil and gas exploration.

“The price of oil extraction is too high,” the party wrote
[[link removed]] in
a statement at the time. “This is based upon economic calculations,
but considerations of the impact on climate and the environment also
play a central role in the decision.”

These kinds of environmental protections are exactly what Trump aims
to remove from American mining. On his own first day in office, one of
Trump’s many executive orders directed
[[link removed]]government
officials to remove “undue burdens” on the industry, so that the
United States could become “the leading producer and processor of
nonfuel minerals, including rare earth minerals.”

“I Went to Greenland to Try to Buy It”

The push for control of the arctic country comes as deep-pocketed
investors like Andreessen have been drawn to start-ups hoping to build
experimental enclaves, sold by the promise of freedom from the
constraints of government.

Proposals for these cryptostates have sprung up in Honduras, Nigeria,
the Marshall Islands, and Panama, the latter of which Trump has also
recently proposed taking over by military force
[[link removed]].
While each concept looks a little different, often the sales pitch
includes replacing taxes and regulations with cryptocurrency and
blockchain.

For Praxis, these utopian dreams have led to Greenland, which is often
incorrectly imagined as an unpopulated frontier. “I went to
Greenland to try to buy it,” Praxis founder Dryden Brown posted on
X [[link removed]] in
November, noting he first became interested in the island “when
Trump offered to buy it in 2019.” Once in Nuuk, he learned that the
country has long sought
[[link removed]] independence
from Denmark and that many Greenlanders support sovereignty
[[link removed]],
though the country remains reliant
[[link removed]] on
Denmark for financial support. It currently receives $500 million
[[link removed]]
a year in Danish subsidies that account for 20 percent of the
economy.

“They do not want to be ‘bought,’” Brown belatedly discovered,
concluding, “There is an obvious opportunity here.” He proposed
taxes from an independently run city like Praxis could help replace
Danish subsidies.

Greenland, however, does not allow private property, an arrangement
that historically has given communities a stronger voice in
determining how or if its natural resources are developed — and
could prove a problem for Brown’s planned utopia. But perhaps that
could change under a new government.

On Monday, in response to a post referencing “Trump’s projects
related to Greenland,” Praxis’s official X account — whose bio
[[link removed]] reads “We’re meant for more” below
a version of the endeavor’s hallucinogenic
[[link removed]] flag
— boasted
[[link removed]] about “A
new post-state in the far North.”

The start-up “nation” has raised $525 million
[[link removed]],
though Brown, who dropped out of New York University and was fired
[[link removed]]
from his last hedge fund job, hasn’t shared many specifics on
Praxis’s website about his proposal for Greenland. (His
previous efforts
[[link removed]] to
build a city somewhere in the Mediterranean have also so far remained
vague, beyond a branding guide that focused
[[link removed]] on
“traditional, European/Western beauty standards” and recruiting
tech employees with “hot girls.”)

But other tech tycoons’ plans for the island are more concrete.

“This Is About Critical Minerals”

Greenland is warming at a much faster
[[link removed]]
rate than the rest of the planet, causing its glaciers
to precipitously retreat
[[link removed]]. As
the ice recedes, these valuable deposits are becoming more accessible.
A 2023 European Commission survey revealed that Greenland has
twenty-five
[[link removed]]
out of thirty-four minerals classified as critical raw materials, or
resources that are essential to the green energy transition but have a
high risk of disrupted supply chains. The country boasts some of the
world’s largest deposits
[[link removed]]
of nickel and cobalt, and collectively, its mineral reserves almost
equal those of the United States.

This wealth of resources has drawn the attention of companies like
KoBold Metals, whose Silicon Valley backers have a vested interest in
supplying materials for the tech industry.

KoBold has positioned itself
[[link removed]] as providing critical solutions
for climate change, facilitating a global reduction in greenhouse gas
emissions by supplying the materials needed for batteries and other
renewable technologies. The company hailed
[[link removed]] President Joe Biden’s use of
the Defense Production Act to encourage mining in 2022, along with the
Inflation Reduction Act’s measures to subsidize
[[link removed]] international
mining for rare earth minerals.

In Greenland, KoBold Metals’ exploration licenses
[[link removed]] focus
on searching for nickel, copper, cobalt, and platinum-group minerals
— materials important for green energy, but also for data
centers’ rapid growth
[[link removed]].

KoBold’s primary development so far has been developing a copper
mine in Zambia, the largest
[[link removed]] such
find in a century. Copper is used as a key material in the
construction of data centers, and is crucial for artificial
intelligence’s infrastructure. The AI boom is expected to nearly
double
[[link removed]] the
demand for copper by 2050. “We invested in KoBold,” OpenAI chief
executive officer Sam Altman said
[[link removed]],
to “find new deposits.”

Its Zambia venture, too, has been part of a global power struggle, as
the Biden administration backed
[[link removed]]
the development of a railway to transport metals from the region to a
port in Angola. The initiative was part of a broader US effort to
counter China’s growing presence in Africa, offering investments as
an alternative
[[link removed]] to
its Belt and Road Initiative, a trade and infrastructure package.

KoBold’s top executive, however, likes to focus on lithium. “The
growth [of lithium demand] is sort of staggering,” KoBold CEO Kurt
House said [[link removed]] in a
2023 presentation at Stanford. “It’s like a 30x increase in global
production that you need.” One of the places the United States might
turn to for this critical mineral is Greenland, where promising
deposits
[[link removed]] were
recently discovered.

“Everyone wants to have lithium” for its role in creating
batteries, says Majken D. Poulsen, a geologist at the Geological
Survey of Denmark and Greenland. She explains the first exploration
for lithium in Greenland was just conducted last summer in
collaboration with the US State Department. Under Biden, the agency
also helped the country draft a mining investment law,
[[link removed]] aimed
at encouraging investment in Greenland.

Though quite different in tone, Trump’s Greenland bluster shares
similar goals. Charlie Byrd, an investment manager at global assets
management firm Cordiant Capital, is one of many investors now hoping
the president’s gambit will result in policy changes that are more
favorable to foreign investment. “There is no doubt that that would
lead to bigger institutional involvement and more strategic
investment,” he told
[[link removed]] trade
publication _Institutional Investor _this week.

Much of this interest is driven by tensions with China, which
currently accounts for around 70 percent
[[link removed]]
of global rare-earth mining and 90 percent of its processing. This
gives the Asian powerhouse enormous leverage over global tech supply
chains.

Control over the minerals that power technology has become a major
form of soft power, pulling invisible strings in global markets and
shaping alliances. That makes mining regulations in Greenland a
geopolitical chess move.

Today “regulations from the government of Greenland are quite
high,” the Geological Survey’s Poulsen explains. “They have
really strict regulations,” she says, including both environmental
and social considerations, like “local benefits such as taxes, local
workforce, local companies, [and] education.”

Michael Waltz, Trump’s incoming national security advisor, appeared
to confirm that gaining access to the country’s minerals was driving
Trump’s interest. “This is about critical minerals; this is about
natural resources,” he told
[[link removed]] _Fox News._

“You Can’t Put a Name on Land”

Glaciers loomed through Trump Force One’s cockpit window as
Greenland’s coast unspooled behind a bobblehead of the forty-seventh
president, his plastic bouffant bobbing
[[link removed]]
in the turbulence. Dropping through the sharp, thin air, the plane
delivered Donald Trump Jr to the island’s capital of Nuuk in early
January with his father’s message: we intend to take over.

The tour de force — which included bribing people
[[link removed]] to
participate in photo shoots — failed to win over many Greenlanders,
says Inuuteq Kriegel, a Nuuk resident. “We don’t want to be
Americans. We don’t want to be Danish. We’re Greenlanders,” he
said.

A week after Trump Jr’s trip, Rep. Andy Ogles (R-TN) introduced
[[link removed]] the
Make Greenland Great Again Act, instructing Congress to support
Trump’s negotiations with Denmark to acquire Greenland immediately.
(Ogles is currently
[[link removed]] the
subject of an FBI probe around his campaign finance filings and last
week announced
[[link removed]] an
amendment that would allow Trump to run for a third term.)

“It might sound crazy, and one might ask, ‘Why would you want
Greenland?’” Ogles said in a recent video
[[link removed]]. He
was speaking with Kuno Fencker, a member of Greenland’s parliament
representing the Siumut party, who had traveled to Washington, DC.
“Your security interest is our security interest,” Ogles told
Fencker. “Our ability to make best use of your minerals, your
resources, and your riches — to benefit your people and ours — is
in our best interest.”

Fencker, who says taxes and royalties from the island’s minerals and
fossil fuels could pave the way for the island’s independence,
responded, “We have other vast resources, like oil and gas, but that
has been stopped by the current government. But my personal view is
that we have to utilize those resources.”

Fencker’s US trip ignited local controversy
[[link removed]].
Typically Greenland’s international negotiations require
coordination and approval from Denmark; imagine someone like Rep.
Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) single-handedly deciding to negotiate
with the European Union without congressional approval. Fencker’s
party said he was not authorized to discuss Greenland’s foreign
affairs, while Fencker defended his travel as a private mission at his
own expense.

The rogue nature of recent developments has been reinforced by
bombastic press coverage. In Greenland, Kriegel says foreign reporters
“often talk to the loud people — and often the same people — and
they can generalize a whole population by speaking to only a few.”
His own social networks are deeply uncomfortable with Trump’s
attempts to purchase the country.

Trump and his tech donors’ eagerness to seize Greenland, existing
culture and laws be damned, are “representative of a particular
colonial and extractive worldview,” wrote
[[link removed]] Anne
Merrild Hansen, professor of social science and arctic oil and gas
studies at the University of Greenland. The approach treats land and
resources as commodities to be claimed, regardless of the rights or
interests of the people who live there.

All the unwelcome commotion, however, has succeeded in delivering one
change: Kriegel says the country is now unified in wanting to find a
path to independence from Denmark, even if there’s not yet agreement
on how to do so.

“You can’t put a name on land,” he says. “Land belongs to the
people. It’s a part of us, and we’re part of it.”

This article was first published by the Lever
[[link removed]], an award-winning independent
investigative newsroom.

* Greenland
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* Trump
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