These Billionaires Bet Big On Greenland—After Trump Took Interest
ByMartina Di Licosa,Reporter. Martina Di Licosa is a reporter covering consumer businesses
Follow AuthorJan 09, 2026, 06:30am EST
Jan 21, 2026
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Ronald Lauder: The heir to the Estée Lauder fortune, is credited with giving Trump the idea of taking over Greenland during his first term, former White House national security adviser John Bolton confirmed to Forbes.
Lauder has since invested, according to the Danish newspaper Politiken, in an unprofitable Greenlandic freshwater bottling company co-owned by Jørgen Wæver Johansen, local chair of the governing Siumut party in Nuuk and husband to Greenland’s minister of foreign affairs, Vivian Motzfeldt, raising concerns about political interference.
Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Michael Bloomberg: All have invested since 2019 in Kobold Metals, which has looked for valuable rare earth minerals used in electronic devices through AI-powered exploration of the island.
Marc Andreessen: Also invested in Kobold through Andreessen Horowitz Growth, a fund within his venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.
Update: Kobold told Forbes in a statement: “KoBold has no exploration claims, personnel or activities in Greenland.”
Sam Altman: The OpenAI CEO invested in Kobold in 2022.
Peter Thiel: The Paypal and Palantir tech titan funded in early 2021 the startup Praxis, which aims to build a technologically advanced “freedom city” on the island.
Howard Lutnick: Trump’s Secretary of Commerce served as CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald, which has invested in Greenland mining company Critical Metals Corp. for over three decades (he has since divested from Cantor and transferred his shares to his adult children).
Andreessen Horowitz just announced the firm has raised a little more than $15 billion in new funding. The haul represents over 18% of all venture capital dollars allocated in the United States in 2025, according to firm co-founder Ben Horowitz, but even more jaw-dropping is that it brings the organization to more than $90 billion in assets under management, putting it neck-and-neck with Sequoia Capital as among the largest venture firms in the world. Which is fitting, since a16z appears to be very friendly with actual sovereign wealth funds, including at least one from Saudi Arabia.
The firm, which employs many hundreds of people across five offices — three in California, plus New York and Washington, D.C. — has become a globe-spanning operation with employees on six continents. In December, it opened its first Asia office in Seoul for its crypto practice.
That newly committed capital breaks down across five funds: $6.75 billion for growth investments, $1.7 billion each for apps and infrastructure, $1.176 billion for “American Dynamism” (more on that shortly), $700 million for biotech and healthcare, and another $3 billion for other venture strategies. It’s the kind of money that makes you wonder where it all comes from and, more importantly, where it all goes.
The “where it comes from” question is one the firm has historically declined to answer. When we asked a16z this week about its limited partners and its distributed-to-paid-in capital ratio — the DPI, or how much actual cash the firm has returned to investors over its 16-year history — the firm didn’t respond. What we do know is that CalPERS invested $400 million in 2023, marking the first time in a16z’s history it took money from a major California pension fund, probably because institutions with transparency requirements don’t really align with the firm’s preference for opacity. We also know that Sanabil Investments, the venture arm of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, lists Andreessen Horowitz among its portfolio holdings.
The Saudi connection isn’t subtle. Back in 2023, Horowitz and Marc Andreessen appeared onstage with WeWork co-founder Adam Neumann to discuss their $350 million investment in his then-new residential real estate venture, Flow. The venue was a conference backed by one of Saudi Arabia’s largest sovereign funds. Horowitz praised Saudi Arabia as a “startup country,” adding that “Saudi has a founder; you don’t call him a founder, you call him his royal highness.”
But Marc Andreessen has found another royal to admire. Since President Donald Trump’s November 2024 election victory, Andreessen has logged a lot of hours at Mar-a-Lago, by his own account, helping shape policy on tech, business, and economics. Early last year, he became an “unpaid intern” at Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, vetting candidates for the Trump administration — not just for tech roles but for positions in the Defense Department and intelligence agencies. Scott Kupor, a16z’s first employee back in 2009, was sworn in as director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management this past summer.
The biggest name in crypto venture capital closed another mammoth fundraise. The digital assets arm of Andreessen Horowitz, which goes by a16z crypto, announced Tuesday morning that it’s drummed up $2.2 billion for its fifth venture fund. The firm also announced it has promoted its CTO Eddy Lazzarin to general partner.
COPENHAGEN, May 12 (Reuters) – Greenland’s prime minister said on Tuesday that increasing the U.S. military presence in the Arctic territory was part of ongoing negotiations with Washington, as the United States’ desire to own or control the territory remains alive.
President Donald Trump’s assertion that the U.S. must acquire or control Greenland, a semi-autonomous Danish territory, has sparked tension between Washington, Nuuk and Copenhagen, and more broadly within the NATO alliance.
“From the beginning, one of the issues has been that they don’t think we do enough in terms of national security and surveillance in our region, so security and more military presence in Greenland is part of the discussions,” Greenland Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen told reporters in Copenhagen.
US pushes for new military bases in Greenland amid quiet talks with Denmark
GREENLAND OPTIMISTIC ABOUT DEAL
Seeking to calm tensions, Greenland, Denmark and the U.S. earlier this year agreed to hold high-level diplomatic negotiations to resolve the crisis, although the outcome of those ongoing talks has yet to be presented.
The BBC on Tuesday reported that U.S. officials in the talks had signalled they aim to open three new bases in southern Greenland, with one source saying Washington had floated designating the facilities as U.S. sovereign territory.
“Right now we have a defence agreement with the United States where it’s already possible to have more bases,” Nielsen said, adding that the existing defence framework was one possible basis for any expansion but that other arrangements could be explored.
Greenland has repeatedly said it is open to wider military and business cooperation with the U.S., including on mineral resources, but that its sovereignty is non-negotiable.
The United States has one active base in Greenland, the Pituffik Space Base in the northwest, down from around 17 facilities in 1945 when thousands of U.S. personnel staffed facilities around the island.
General Gregory Guillot, head of the U.S. Northern Command, first disclosed the three-base plan in Senate testimony in March. Guillot was in Copenhagen last week, an Instagram post by the U.S. embassy in Copenhagen showed.
Two of the locations under consideration have been identified by local media as Narsarsuaq in southern Greenland and Kangerlussuaq in the southwest, both former U.S. bases with existing airstrips and port infrastructure. A third location has not been named.
The airport manager at Narsarsuaq confirmed to Reuters that a U.S. envoy from the embassy in Copenhagen visited recently to inspect the runway, harbour and whether the facilities could be reopened.
Sources have previously said the expansion is being negotiated under a 1951 U.S.-Danish defence agreement that gives Washington broad military access to Greenland. Experts say Denmark has little practical ability to block U.S. requests under the pact, which was last updated in 2004 to include Greenland as a signatory.
Trump envoy Jeff Landry is scheduled to visit Greenland next week to attend a business conference in the vast Arctic island of 57,000 people. He has not been confirmed to meet any Greenlandic politicians.
(Reporting by Stine Jacobsen and Soren Jeppesen, editing by Terje Solsvik, Rod Nickel)
Retired, living in the Scottish Borders after living most of my life in cities in England. I can now indulge my interest in all aspects of living close to nature in a wild landscape. I live on what was once the Iapetus Ocean which took millions of years to travel from the Southern Hemisphere to here in the Northern Hemisphere. That set me thinking and questioning and seeking answers.
In 1998 I co-wrote Millennium Countdown (US)/ A Business Guide to the Year 2000 (UK) see https://www.abebooks.co.uk/products/isbn/9780749427917
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