A founding member of the “PayPal Mafia” is the man that Donald Trump has chosen to help America take over Greenland. Ken Howery, who formerly served as the chief financial officer of the online payments app, is also known for his longstanding ties to two other pivotal members of that aforementioned “mafia”: tech billionaires Elon Musk and Peter Thiel.
Howery, who previously served in the first Trump administration as the U.S. ambassador to Sweden between 2019 and 2021, has been selected as Trump’s new ambassador to Denmark. Trump has stated that he wants to buy Greenland from Denmark, though officials from the Scandinavian country have repeatedly said that the territory is not for sale. Trump, not to be deterred, has insisted that he’s going to make it happen and has even said he wouldn’t rule out the use of military force to seal the deal.
Howery still needs to be confirmed by the Senate for the role. If he is, he will be tasked with trying to maneuver a deal that critics have deemed “insane.” While Trump hasn’t been particularly clear about why he wants Greenland, it’s generally agreed upon that the territory is of significant geostrategic importance. During the Cold War, the U.S. notably attempted to build a network of nuclear missile launch sites in Greenland for use in a “second-strike” capacity against the Soviet Union. The effort was a tightly held secret and, allegedly, the U.S. never even informed the Danish government it was doing this.
Howery’s potential involvement in the new pivotal administration role is just more evidence of the PayPal mafia’s political ascendance under the new Trump administration. Like many of the PayPal crew, Howery and Thiel were college buddies at Stanford. Howery wrote for The Stanford Review, Thiel’s student newspaper, and, together, the two would go on to create Founder’s Fund, the powerful venture capital firm that has backed some of the most successful tech companies in Silicon Valley, including Facebook, SpaceX, and others.
As far as U.S. State Department officials go, Howery seems to enjoy an unusually colorful social life. Indeed, nearly half a dozen times throughout the Times piece, reporters refer to his capacity to “party.” Howery is reportedly known for his extravagant social outings, including a Halloween party at a castle in Transylvania in 2022, where Thiel and other billionaires appeared. A previous Times story from 2022 also notes how Howery “threw himself a birthday party at an imposing 19th-century castle outside Stockholm” in November of 2020.
During the pandemic, Musk spent significant time living out of Howery’s mansion in Houston, and in 2021, he is said to have hosted a party there where guests were forced to sign non-disclosure agreements. At that party was Joe Rogan (who platformed Trump during the election and has hosted Musk many times on his podcast), Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, “techno-optimist” doofus Jamie Wheal, and other well-known VIPs, many of whom have ties to the broader techno-libertarian network that circulates around Thiel.
We previously reported that the Network State movement—a weird political movement that wants to build its own privately-owned, cryptocurrency-powered cities—has also expressed interest in purchasing Greenland and using it to trial its techno-colonization efforts. Dryden Brown, the CEO of the Network State-linked Praxis project, has even claimed that acquiring Greenland is part of his movement’s broader “plan.” The Network State movement has received considerable financial support from Thiel, who also financially supported Trump during his first presidential run in 2016.
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