Billionaires Eyeing Greenland

The acquisition of Greenland has long been a pet project for Trump, who first mused about the possibility in 2019. Back then, despite Trump’s insistence that acquiring the island would be as simple as making “a large real estate deal,” the proposal was widely mocked as absurd and went nowhere. This time, however, Trump seems serious — and European leaders are sounding the alarm. The Polish prime minister, Donald Tusk, a conservative whose nation did not join the European troop deployment earlier this month, said that any American attempt to annex Greenland “would be the end of the world as we know it.”

The roots of Trump’s apparent obsession with acquiring Greenland are not, on the surface, entirely clear. Trump is likely aware that, should the United States add Greenland to its empire, it would be the largest territorial acquisition in American history — a prospect that may appeal to his imperial impulses. He has also framed the potential acquisition of Greenland as a matter of national security, and he is not alone in his analysis: the island’s position between Europe and North America has long intrigued the US, and as Greenland rapidly warms due to the effects of climate change, it is increasingly able to accommodate international shipping traffic and increasingly a target for rare-earth mineral mining.

It is that last possibility that may be most tantalizing for members of Trump’s inner orbit and the tech oligarchs who were so prominently seated at his inauguration last year. Members of that elite group have had their eyes on Greenland for some time. Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman, and Bill Gates have all invested in KoBold Metals, a company that uses artificial intelligence to search for rare minerals, such as a 2022 project to search for battery minerals in western Greenland. Forbes has identified other Trump allies, including Estée Lauder heir Ronald Lauder and secretary of commerce Howard Lutnick, who either have or have had extensive business ties to the island.

In fact, according to former national security advisor John Bolton, it was Lauder who first piqued Trump’s interest in acquiring Greenland in 2018. Lauder, who attended business school with Trump, has reportedly been ramping up his investments on the island: the Danish newspaper Politiken reported late last year that Lauder has bought into two Greenlandic companies, one selling mineral water taken from an island off Greenland’s west coast and another attempting to generate hydroelectric power from the island’s biggest lake.

Last February, shortly after Trump assumed office for the second time, Lauder took to the pages of the New York Post to defend Trump’s interest in Greenland as coolly “strategic” — writing that beneath the island’s “ice and rock” lies “a treasure trove of rare earth elements essential for AI, advanced weaponry and modern technology.” Lauder also noted in the piece that Greenlanders could hold an independence referendum at “any time,” meaning the United States has a “narrow window to strengthen ties before other powers move in.”

Lauder could stand to benefit handsomely if the US acquires Greenland, as could the likes of Bezos. But perhaps the most ardent boosters of the American effort to assume control of Greenland are the proponents of the network state movement, a push to create a series of unregulated economic zones they can run without the interference of nation-state governance.

The Network State Movement

In August of last year, Reuters reported that a group of Silicon Valley elites were lobbying the Trump administration to consider Greenland for the site of a network state or “freedom” city — a virtually unregulated hub for “artificial intelligence, autonomous vehicles, space launches, micro nuclear reactors and high-speed rail.”

Details on how this hub would be built or where exactly it would be located remain sparse, but key players in the network state movement are well positioned vis-à-vis the Trump administration to make it a reality.

Peter Thiel, the multibillionaire cofounder of PayPal and Palantir, has been a leading proponent of the network state model for nearly two decades. Five years ago, a Thiel-backed city-building firm called Pronomos Capital invested in Praxis, a company founded by a New York University dropout and former hedge fund analyst named Dryden Brown. Praxis’s aim was to build a new charter city from scratch, attracting venture capital and leading figures from the worlds of technology and finance. Brown, to give provide a brief glimpse of the political leanings of the movement, reportedly told a speechwriter he came up with the idea for Praxis after watching protesters break shop windows in SoHo following the police murder of George Floyd and later reportedly encouraged his staff to read the work of the fascist Italian writer Julia Evola.

Praxis first aimed to build its gleaming new city on the Mediterranean but quickly turned its sights north. A week after Trump was reelected to the presidency in 2024, Brown posted on the social media platform X that he had just been to Greenland on a scouting trip for Praxis — which bills itself, without a trace of irony, as “the future of Western Civilization.”

“Greenland is an actual frontier,” Brown wrote. “It’s hardcore. If humanity is going to build Terminus on Mars, we should practice in Greenland. It can serve as a sandbox for terraformation experiments, funded by realizing its potential as a mining and industrial hub.”

Brown’s fantastic vision for the future of Greenland includes man-made rain in the summer, winter days artificially lengthened by reflecting sunlight off the frozen terrain, a new sovereign wealth fund, and “ownership” in the “private charter state” represented with tokens. Brown suggested it would be in the United States’ interest to support the creation of this network state as part of a “New Monroe Doctrine,” which would project American “cultural, economic, and political power.”

Thiel is just one of Brown’s notable backers. Praxis also has the support of firms connected to Altman, Marc Andreessen, and disgraced cryptocurrency pioneer Sam Bankman-Fried, and it may have an ally inside the government as well: Ken Howery, who cofounded PayPal and a venture capital firm with Thiel, has served since October of last year as the US ambassador to Denmark. He was reportedly appointed with the understanding that he would lead negotiations for the Greenland acquisition. Elon Musk, another key figure in the founding of PayPal and another network state proponent, is similarly enthused.

Trump’s imperial belligerence can’t be overstated. But it would be a mistake to overlook how those personal aspirations align with the interests of the tech right that entered his orbit in 2024 and helped him win the presidency.

“Freedom” Against Democracy

The network state movement’s influence on the Trump administration’s approach to its increasingly bellicose foreign policy is not limited to Greenland. It is no coincidence that this Praxis-driven vision for a freedom city in Greenland looks so much like the Trump administration’s plan for Gaza. Both spaces exist in the imaginary of the administration and its Silicon Valley allies as a kind of terra nullius — Gaza because it has been so helpfully leveled by the Israeli military in the wake of October 7, and Greenland because it is so sparsely inhabited.

The Trump administration’s first major plan for the post-genocide future of Gaza has proposed turning the Strip into “a Mediterranean hub for manufacturing, trade, data, and tourism, benefiting from its strategic location, access to markets (Europe, GCC [the Gulf Cooperation Council], Asia), resources, and a young workforce, all supported by Israeli tech and GCC investments.” Gaza is not being imagined as a fully private freedom state, but the Trump administration’s vision for its future has clearly been shaped by the freedom city movement: it includes no right of self-determination and no democracy for the Palestinian people, just regulation-free resource extraction, free trade, and subservience to the interests of the United States, Israel, and the Gulf States.

Skepticism or outright hostility toward democracy is one of the most prominent features of the freedom city movement. As early as 2009, Thiel was writing about his belief that freedom and democracy are not “compatible.” The goal, Thiel wrote in that Cato Unbound essay, was not to win popular support for his libertarian vision but rather to escape the political process altogether: “Because there are no truly free places left in our world, I suspect that the mode for escape must involve some sort of new and hitherto untried process that leads us to some undiscovered country,” Thiel wrote, “and for this reason I have focused my efforts on new technologies that may create a new space for freedom.”

Thiel has been true to his word. He invested well over $1 million in an institute that ultimately failed in its effort to build a “libertarian utopia” in the islands of French Polynesia before his firm poured money into Praxis. Pronomos is also an investor in Próspera, a network state on the island of Roatán in Honduras, and in Itana, a network state under development in Nigeria.

There is a certain irony in the fact that the Trump administration appears so supportive of a project that ultimately aims to leave nation-states behind entirely. The administration seems prepared to use the full weight of the American state to serve the economic aims and colonial fantasies of the Silicon Valley superrich, even if those aims and fantasies are only partially aligned with the aims and ambitions of the United States itself. Van Jackson has written that the geopolitics of the network state movement is concerned with “leveraging state power to challenge the state form,” a formulation that is useful when considering why Trump promised to build freedom cities on federal land within the US during his 2024 campaign.

The Trump administration’s goal, supported by its allies in Silicon Valley, is to seize land and resources and share the spoils directly with private capital. Shades of this approach are evident in the administration’s ongoing incursion into Venezuela, which has seen the United States seize and begin to sell off the country’s oil reserves and deposit the proceeds into a series of US-controlled bank accounts, including a main account located in Qatar. Trump has similarly struck a deal with Ukraine for preferential access to mineral extraction in the country and a bevy of other natural resources in exchange for the United States’ ongoing support in its conflict with Russia.

Now, more than seven years after Lauder first piqued Trump’s interest, Greenland has become the president’s central focus. Greenlanders, who have never enjoyed full political independence, are trapped in a difficult position: as the intensification of climate change imperils their fishing industry and lifeways, it also makes the extraction of Greenland’s rare-earth minerals and clean water a seductive possibility. For the billionaires inside and outside high elected office, Greenland is imagined as a frontier, a space that, in the words of Quinn Slobodian, exists to be “enclosed into private property” and serve as a laboratory for dystopian experiments in libertarian governance.

Where that leaves Greenlanders, Americans, the crumbling liberal international order, or the future health of the planet is not a major concern for Trump and his Silicon Valley backers. They appear to care little for the existing international order or the sovereignty of other nations more generally, and they are uninterested in the fate of anyone who lacks millions of dollars in personal wealth or seed money. They believe in enriching themselves and, it seems, in setting up a new type of state infrastructure to eliminate even the smallest restrictions on their power. If it all goes bad, not to fear — the movement’s leading lights can always retreat to their fallout shelters.