"I went to Greenland to try to buy it."
Dryden Brown, CEO of the tech company Praxis, wrote that in an X post in November 2024. The "offer" from Brown, who wants to found a city in Greenland through Praxis, was not taken very seriously, according to the site Gizmodo.
A little over a year later, the situation is different. Some would argue that things are looking more favorable for the circle of tech billionaires who have far-reaching plans for land in Greenland.
"Now, after centuries, it's time for Denmark to give back - world peace is at stake! China and Russia want Greenland and there's nothing Denmark can do about it," President Donald Trump wrote on social media on Saturday.
The comment is one of many similar statements from the world's most powerful man in which he points to Greenland as essential from an American defense perspective.
Attracts Silicon Valley
For Silicon Valley giants like Peter Thiel, who co-founded both Palantir and PayPal, other factors are the draw. According to an investigation by The Guardian, tech moguls who want to invest in Greenland gave a total of 2.2 billion kronor in contributions to Trump's 2024 election campaign.
One example is the company Kobold Metals, which is mining rare-earth metals in Greenland using AI and is funded by, among others, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, OpenAI's Sam Altman and Meta's Mark Zuckerberg.
The controversial libertarian Thiel, who has expressed skepticism about democracy, was an early supporter of Donald Trump when he donated millions to the future president's election campaign in 2016. When current Vice President JD Vance began his political career in earnest by running for senator in Ohio in 2022, which he won, Thiel donated the equivalent of approximately SEK 150 million to the campaign fund.
Thiel, along with other influential tech billionaires such as Marc Andreessen, is a major investor in Praxis, which has capital equivalent to around five billion kronor.
Want to build a "mythical city"
When Trump wrote a post on his Truth Social platform last January about "buying Greenland," it wasn't long before Dryden Brown, in a series of posts on X, talked about his plans for the island.
"Praxis would like to help Greenland develop by coordinating talent, companies, and capital with the aim of securing the Arctic, extracting critical resources, cultivating the land with advanced technology to make it more livable, and building a mythical city in the north," he summarized in one of the posts.
After Trump appointed Kenneth Howery, who has had several close business partnerships with Peter Thiel, as US ambassador to Denmark, Praxis responded via X to the announcement:
"According to plan"
He was born in 1967 in what was then West Germany, but the family moved to the United States the following year.
He got his big career breakthrough as co-founder of the payment service PayPal, which was launched in 1999 and sold to eBay in 2002 for $1.5 billion.
He has since continued to invest in and found a wide range of companies. In recent years, he has gained attention for the controversial AI company Palantir, which he founded in 2003.
In addition to his business activities, he is also politically involved and donated several million kronor to Donald Trump's election campaign in 2016.
He has described himself as a conservative libertarian and has expressed skepticism about democracy. In a 2009 essay, he wrote that he "no longer believes that democracy and freedom are compatible."
In the book "Zero to One," Thiel argues that companies should strive for monopolies and that competition is for "losers."
On the Forbes list of the world's richest people, Peter Thiel ended up in 78th place in 2025 with a fortune of approximately SEK 260 billion.
