Tech moguls and other wealthy individuals who donated to Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign could financially profit if the United States takes over Greenland, given their deepening financial ties there, according to a report.
Since returning to the White House, Trump has been keenly eying a takeover of the autonomous territory of Denmark. Vice President JD Vance even visited Greenland last month to underscore the administration’s startling insistence to control the island.
Trump said flatly ahead of Vance’s visit: “We need it. We have to have it.”
Trump’s National Security Adviser Mike Waltz told Fox News in January: “This is about critical minerals. This is about natural resources.” The president has also insisted that national and international security interests are driving his plan to control the Arctic territory.
The motivation to control the territory could be essentially commercial. Greenland has significant reserves of rare earth minerals, which are critical to the tech industry — and to advanced defense technologies.
Dominant in the rare earth minerals supply chain is China, which early this month placed significant export restrictions on some of the minerals in retaliation for Trump’s trade war.
Now, in a review of campaign finance records and corporate filings, mining companies.
The revelation has raised ethics and influence questions about the motivation behind the president’s push to take over the territory.
Vice President JD Vance gestures as he tours Pituffik Space Base in March. A group of Trump 2024 campaign donors who have invested in Greenland mining companies stand to potentially profit if the U.S. takes control of the Arctic territory, according to a report (AP)
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos have each invested millions in KoBold Metals, a mineral exploration company powered by AI tools, the outlet reported. Meta and Amazon each donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration, while Altman personally contributed the same amount.
Meanwhile, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick previously led financial services firm Cantor Fitzgerald, which is invested in Critical Metals Corp., a company licensed to mine in Greenland , the New York Times first reported in January.
Lutnick stepped down as chairman and CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald after the Senate confirmed him as Commerce Secretary. He “agreed to divest his business interests in Cantor Fitzgerald … to comply with U.S. government ethics rules and does not expect any arrangement that involves selling shares on the open market,” a February press release from the firm said.
Lutnick also donated millions to a Trump campaign super PAC in the months leading up to the 2024 election, FEC filings show.
Other Critical Metals Corp. investors — Vanguard, BlackRock, Geode Capital and State Street – also collected $314 million worth of shares in Trump Media, The Guardian reported.
The financial ties to Trump and Greenland’s mining efforts represent a “circle of grift,” Robert Weissman, co-president of think tank Public Citizen, told the outlet.
“Put money into the Trump family bank and the money comes back to you in the form of some government policy,” Weissman insisted. “That even includes the deployment of the empire in service of libertarians who favor a stateless society.”
Then there’s Praxis co-founder Dryden Brown, who deemed Greenland a “crypto-native country.” Last November, he said he visited Greenland to try to buy it, Gizmodo previously reported.
One month later, Trump posted on Truth Social, claiming that U.S. ownership of Greenland is “a necessity” and tapped PayPal cofounder and Trump donor Ken Howery as its ambassador. Brown shared a screenshot of the president’s post on X, to which the Praxis account replied: “According to plan.”
Still, some experts don’t think Greenland is the home of the next so-called “gold rush.”
The Arctic climate is difficult to navigate and costly to extract resources, Paul Bierman, a natural resources researcher at the University of Vermont who has spent time in Greenland, told The Guardian. The notion that a “gold rush” is possible is “almost completely pie in the sky,” Bierman said.
And, while the people of Greenland may want to be independent from Denmark, many fearful residents are organizing against a takeover by the U.S.
