We'll be okay as long as the Silicon Valley grown-up are in charge -- Greenland edition

I'll try to come back to this one with one or two more detailed posts, but for now, here are a few quick observations.

1. This goes a long way toward explaining why the conquest of Greenland remains such a high priority for the White House. I suspect that most people assumed this was just a personal, passing obsession with Trump, when in fact it appears to have considerable support among his backers.

2. The assumption that the sane and sober PayPal Mafia and their hand-picked vice president would be a moderating and stabilizing influence on the administration was always based on a profound misunderstanding of who these people are.

3. The discussion of Greenland's mineral resources was, for me, perhaps the most chilling part. Just coming out and saying we should take them over because they have nice stuff strips away any pretense of justification.

4. Thiel et al. have had this dream for a long time. From Wired (paywalled but discussed here):

THE SEASTEADING INSTITUTE was the toast of tech entrepreneurs when it received financial backing from venture capitalist Peter Thiel in 2008. Its mission was to build a manmade island nation where inventors could work free of heavy-handed government interference. One early rendering shows an island raised on concrete stilts in eerily calm waters. [Spoiler alert: it turned out that the open ocean in the middle of international waters were seldom eerily calm. -- MP]] The buildings atop the platform resemble nothing so much as the swanky tech campus of an entrepreneur’s ultimate dream: No sign of land or civilization in sight. The island, despite appearing strapped for square footage, has room for a full-size swimming pool with deck lounges.

...

Thiel’s reassessment marks a clear departure from tech culture’s unflinching confidence in its ability to self-govern. In recent years a number of prominent entrepreneurs have urged Silicon Valley to create a less inhibited place for its work. Larry Page called on technologists to “set aside a small part of the world” to test new ideas. Elon Musk has aimed at colonizing Mars. And venture capitalist Tim Draper made a proposal to divide Silicon Valley into its own state. But aside from the continued growth of full-service tech campuses such as Google’s and Facebook’s, very little has been accomplished in the way of true societal independence.

One quick side note. While California Forever does have a clear libertarian influence and is modeled after the far-right, white-flight enclave that gave us Matt Gaetz, unlike the Greenland proposal, it is less of a political statement and more of a classic real estate scheme taken from the oldest page in the playbook: Quietly, or even secretly, scoop up land on the cheap, then manipulate the system to get it rezoned. It's a classic because it may be the simplest and easiest way to make a huge windfall profit without breaking any laws (at least most of the time).

Mack DeGeurin writing for Popular Science:

Who is behind the freedom city? 

The Reuters report cites claims Howery, Thiel, and prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalist Marc Andreesen are amongst the most prominent names backing the Greenland effort. Howery, who still needs the US Senate to confirm his position as ambassador to Denmark, is reportedly a long-time friend of billionaire Elon Musk and formerly founded a venture capital firm with Thiel. Thiel, meanwhile, has emerged as one of the loudest supporters, both vocally and financially, of the “Seasteading” movement, which is trying to build floating, stateless utopia cities in the ocean. Andressen, notably, is also part of a tech-investor consortium California Forever looking to build the city in Solano County.  Each of these efforts—along with others like the already existing city Próspera in Honduras—are united by libertarian political ideals, a focus on technological development, and lots of money.  

Rumors around the proposed Greenland city date back at least to November 2024 when Praxis co-founder Dryden Brown fired off a series of tweets explaining how he had tried to purchase land in Greenland. Praxis is a self-described “internet-native nation” crypto startup with a stated goal of “restor[ing] Western civilization,” and has reportedly received over $525 million in funding to start building out new cities. Brown told Reuters he has since been approached by several companies to explore establishing a new city on Greenland.

 

Why the obsession with Greenland? 

The idea of the U.S. acquiring Greenland, once widely regarded as a joke during the first Trump administration, has evolved into a serious U.S. foreign policy objective. The president campaigned on the issue during the 2024 election and has since doubled down, despite repeated assertions from Danish officials that the island isn’t for sale. Nevertheless, Vice President J.D. Vance and his wife, Usha Vance, visited a U.S. military installation on the island in March 2024 and delivered a speech urging Greenlanders to voluntarily cut ties with Denmark. (Recent polling shows that an overwhelming majority of Greenland residents oppose the idea of possible annexation by the U.S.) President Trump, meanwhile, has not ruled out the possibility of taking the territory by force.

So why all the obsession with a mostly uninhabitable island with a population of around 57,000? Supporters of Greenland development laid out their arguments during a Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation hearing earlier this year. During the hearing, Texas Mineral Resources Board Chairman Anthony Marchese claimed Greenland’s coastline holds what is “indisputably” one of the greatest collections of minerals found in a single jurisdiction. That includes rare earth minerals, which are crucial to powering a plethora of modern consumer electronics devices.