One of the founders of the “PayPal mafia” is the man who was chosen by Donald Trump to help America occupy Greenland. Ken Howery, who was previously the chief financial officer of the online payment app, is also known for his long-standing ties to two other key members of the aforementioned “mob”: tech billionaires Elon Musk and Peter Thiel.
Howery, who previously served in the first Trump administration as the US ambassador to Sweden between 2019 and 2021, has been selected as Trump’s new ambassador to Denmark. Trump stated that wants to buy Greenland from Denmark, although the officials of that Scandinavian country have repeatedly said that it is the territory is not for sale. Not to be outdone, Trump insisted that it would happen and even said it would would not rule out the use of military force seal the deal.
Howery still needs to be confirmed by the Senate for the role. If so, he will have the task of trying to reach an agreement that critics considered “crazy”. Although Trump was not particularly clear why he wants Greenland, it is generally agreed that that territory is of significant geostrategic significance. During the Cold War, the US specifically 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 closely guarded secret and, allegedly, the US never even he informed the Danish government this worked.
Howery’s potential appointment to a key new administration role is just one more piece of evidence of the political rise of the PayPal mob under the new Trump administration. Like many members of the PayPal team, Howery and Thiel were friends at Stanford. Howery wrote for The Stanford ReviewThiel’s student newspaper, and together the two would create Founder’s Fund, a powerful venture capital firm that has backed some of Silicon Valley’s most successful tech companies, including Facebook, SpaceX and others.
For a US State Department official, Howery seems to enjoy an unusually colorful social life. Indeed, nearly half a dozen times throughout the Times piece, reporters refer to his ability to “entertain.” Howery is reportedly known for his extravagant social outings, including a 2022 Halloween party at a castle in Transylvania, where Thiel and other billionaires showed up. AND previous times a 2022 story also notes that Howery “threw a birthday party at an imposing 19th-century castle outside Stockholm” in November 2020.
During the pandemic, Musk spent a lot of time living out of Howery’s mansion in Houston, and in 2021. he said that he hosted a party there where the guests were forced to sign a confidentiality agreement. At that party was Joe Rogan (who platform Trump during the election and hosted Musk many times on his podcast), Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, “techno-optimist” doofus Jamie Wheal and other famous VIPs, many of whom are connected to the wider techno-libertarian network that circles Thiel.
Me previously published that the network state movement is a strange political movement that wants to build its own privately owned cities powered by cryptocurrencies— has also expressed interest in buying Greenland and using it to test out his techno-colonization efforts. Dryden Brown, executive director of the network-state-affiliated Praxis Project, even claimed that the takeover of Greenland was part of his movement’s larger “plan.” The Network State movement has received significant financial support from Thiel, who also financially supported Trump during his first presidential run in 2016.