The Oligarchs Pushing for Conquest in Greenland

Donald Trump’s fixation on seizing Greenland has generated plenty of confusion, hand-wringing, and alarm. But one question has always stood at the center: Why? Why has Trump perseverated so heavily, and so suddenly, on this distant island, with its few people and even fewer connections to the United States?

According to Trump, much of it has to do with national security. “We have to have it,” the president has said time and again. As Trump claims—and in direct contradiction to any evidence at hand—Greenland is apparently crawling with Russian and Chinese ships, presenting a national security crisis that annexation alone will solve. Seizing Greenland is also part of the emerging “Donroe Doctrine,” in which the U.S. has the right to intervene, and even seize, any lands within the Western Hemisphere that it feels like taking.

But there’s another element to this Greenland obsession that hasn’t gotten nearly enough attention—and it is just as important to Trump’s designs on plundering Greenland and claiming the island as America’s: money. Specifically, the money set to be gained by the kinds of oligarchic interests that have long backed Trump, and who now stand to benefit from American suzerainty over Greenland. To update another phrase, which we’ve seen recently race to the fore in Venezuela: It’s about looting the resources, stupid.

But even here there’s more than meets the eye. Buried within the kind of crony capitalist network that has propelled Trump’s imperialism is something far stranger, and far darker, than simply seizing Greenland resources for financial gain. It’s about the opening salvos in a world in which any restrictions on American oligarchy—any oversight, any democratic checks, any hurdles whatsoever—are removed, and a golden, pro-oligarchic age reigns, centered on, but by no means limited to, Greenland.

An island itself nearly the size of Venezuela, Greenland is a veritable treasure chest of critical minerals and high-value resources. Zinc, copper, gold, oil, even things like uranium and platinum—Greenland is periodic table of elements brought to life. Because most of the island is a combination of glacier and sere tundra, most of those elements are untapped. But that doesn’t mean they’ve been unmapped, and that excavation plans haven’t been plotted.

And few cohorts have done more mapping, plotting, and planning than the coterie of American oligarchs who have surged to Trump’s side in recent years—and who stand to gain hand over fist if Trump wrests Greenland from Denmark’s control.

This is hardly speculation. As The Guardian reported in April 2025, “Some of Donald Trump’s biggest campaign donors and investors … are positioned to potentially profit from any American takeover of Greenland.” Ranging from tech moguls to fossil fuel company heads, all of these figures and forces have invested in mining and extraction companies across the island—and all stand to profit if only they can cut out any pesky Danish or Greenlandic authorities from regulating or restraining their operations. A “closed loop” of “investors, billionaires, [and] Trump” have emerged to circle Greenland, swirling it like a committee of vultures, eyeing which parts of Greenland to pluck clean. As The New York Times added last year, Trump is “flanked by wealthy investors who have eyed [Greenland] as a potentially lucrative venue for mining metals and minerals.”

The figures behind the curtain are by no means obscure. Companies like KoBold Metals, a mining outfit helping lead Greenland’s “modern gold rush,” has seen investments from figures like Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and hedge funds like Andreessen Horowitz. Another company eyeing Greenland is Critical Metals Corp, which is backed by the same hedge fund that Howard Lutnick, now Trump’s commerce secretary, spent years running. Indeed, the investors behind Critical Metals Corp have significant overlap with those investors behind Trump Media—creating what Robert Weissman, who helps run the pro-transparency group Public Citizen, called a “circle of grift.” Many of those same figures also gave hundreds of millions of dollars to Trump’s 2024 campaign, helping relaunch him to the presidency—and helping them profit from Trump’s new imperialism.

For years, this tangle of deep-pocketed corporate heads backing American politicians and receiving ever-greater profits has been baked into the domestic firmament in the US. So, too, has this long been part of American foreign policy, with everything from energy majors to arms manufacturers to fruit companies shifting and even spearheading American policy from Central America to Central Asia to West Africa and beyond.

Now, however, this kind of corporate donor class—overseen itself by an emergent American oligarchy, cozying up to Trump’s White House for its own benefit—has begun steering not just policy, but the machinery of expansionist empire outright. It’s a model we haven’t seen in over a century, not since the days of American sugar barons toppling Hawaii’s government, ushering in an oligarchic police state and steering the islands toward American annexation. But it’s a model that, in Greenland, is now impossible to miss. The relationship between oligarchic backers and Trump now “includes the deployment of the [American] empire,” Weissman added—regardless of what it might mean for Greenland, or even for the U.S. itself.

Yet even that story—of American oligarchs pushing an imperial president to new land seizures and new wealth—is only part of the picture. Greenland isn’t only a treasure trove for some of these oligarchic forces to mine or to extract. It’s also a place for experimentation, of not only how to expand American empire, but to create a world in which all of these oligarchic figures’ utopian (or dystopian for the rest of us) fantasies can come true.

The man long at the center of these murkier fantasies is a slender, sandy-haired American named Dryden Brown. He is the head of an organization called Praxis, which has become one of the centers of the so-called “network state” movement. The definition of “network states” is itself is a bit jumbled; a “network state,” says backer Balaji Srinivasan, is a “highly aligned online community with a capacity for collective action that crowdfunds territory around the world and eventually gains diplomatic recognition from pre-existing states.”

If you scrape past the techno-babble, the idea for a “network state” is relatively simple: it is a new nation, both online and on land, that can provide an escape hatch for forces who want to do away with regulatory oversight or financial checks. Who envision a world in which they can expand both their wealth and their influence as wide as they want, and who believe that nation-states—including places like the U.S.—are passé, outmoded ways of organizing societies, and that the next iteration of humanity must belong to these self-appointed visionaries, authoring a revolutionary future wherever they can.

Gathering supporters largely from the world of crypto enthusiasts, Praxis emerged in recent years as the leader of this movement. Its manifesto, published in 2024, posited that the world is “at an inflection point where power is increasingly determined by the ability to capture mindshare of globally dispersed communities.” Praxis, with Brown at the helm, would create a world in which all the trappings of society—infrastructure, contracts, and more—are placed and tracked on the blockchain. This would all create a “Sovereign Network” or “Digital Nation” that would be, as Le Monde reported, a “tax-free enclave, governed by free-market principles and managed by a king-CEO leading citizen-shareholders.”

Still, for a “Sovereign Network” to emerge in the real world, it would need territory on which to operate. While other similar efforts—in Honduras, Nigeria, and elsewhere—have fallen apart, Brown told me last year that one place in particular continued to catch his eye: Greenland. “We think Greenland is a very interesting place,” Brown said. “We view it as one of the last frontiers of Earth.”

If Brown operated on his own, he’d be hardly worth writing about. But Praxis has received funding from significant investors from across the U.S.—including many of the same oligarchs in Trump’s immediate orbit.

There’s Peter Thiel, the venture capitalist who has long backed Trump, and who has long called for oligarchic fellow travelers to “escape” democratic oversight. Others, such as Marc Andreessen (of the aforementioned Andreessen Horotiwz) have likewise backed funds that support Praxis, with fellow investors like Jon Lonsdale also supporting the group. Even the Winklevoss twins, best known for their early roles at Facebook, have steered investment to Praxis.

Perhaps the most conspicuous oligarch linked to Praxis is none other than Sam Altman. While Altman has never commented publicly about Praxis, his Apollo Ventures firm has funded Praxis directly. “Altman has strange politics,” Gil Duran, who has tracked the “network state” movement perhaps more than anyone else, wrote in 2024. “His investment in Praxis makes it clear that, despite platitudes about creating a better future, he’s betting on some kind of dramatic collapse.”

This also may seem a strange, outré cast of figures and forces backing the push to seize Greenland. But those bizarreries help explain how we ended up in this strange place, with Trump now threatening to cleave apart a NATO ally alongside his plutocratic cronies.

Last year, during Trump’s early rounds of demands that the U.S. be given control of Greenland, Reuters reported that a range of “Silicon Valley tech investors” had begun “promoting the frozen island as a site for a so-called freedom city, a libertarian utopia with minimal corporate regulation.” Aligning with Praxis’s vision for a “network state” in Greenland, Reuters reported that these oligarchic investors envisioned transforming Greenland into a supposed start-up paradise for Silicon Valley obsessions, building the island into a “hub for artificial intelligence, autonomous vehicles, space launches, micro nuclear reactors, and high-speed rail.” Some of the names mentioned were those already connected with Praxis. Both Thiel and Andreessen were reportedly propelling the idea, as was Lonsdale, who called outright for “expanding our country to Greenland.” (Thiel has denied interest or involvement, while Andreessen declined to comment.) But there was one additional name mentioned: Ken Howery, himself a former venture capitalist who had previously co-founded PayPal, alongside Thiel and Musk.

Yet Howery wasn’t simply another hyper-capitalist floating out of Silicon Valley; he was appointed by Trump himself as the U.S.’s newest ambassador to Denmark—and was specifically “expected to… lead Greenland-acquisition negotiations,” those familiar with his appointment said.

Nearly a year later, those negotiations are reaching their final stages, with Trump telegraphing that he will make whatever move necessary—even military if needed—to steal Greenland. It’s a plan that has the potential to fracture NATO, and even spark a new age of nuclear arms races and outright imperialism. It is also, as we’re now learning, a plan that extends far beyond Trump—and that includes a cast of oligarchs looking to steer American empire once more.

Or as Praxis’s social media feed posted in response to Howery’s appointment: “According to plan.”