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 Trumps 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 hes going to make it happen and has even said he wouldnt 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 hasnt been particularly clear about why he wants Greenland, its 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. Howerys potential involvement in the new pivotal administration role is just more evidence of the PayPal mafias 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, Thiels student newspaper, and, together, the two would go on to create Founders 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 Howerys 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 movementa weird political movement that wants to build its own privately-owned, cryptocurrency-powered citieshas 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 movements 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.