The thing about reading African history is that when you hear Peter Thiel or Elon Musk talk about their ideal “colony” it sounds just like a Rhodesia fever dream. Musk was raised in apartheid Pretoria. Thiel was born in Frankfurt and partly raised in apartheid-administered South West Africa. The documented apartheid enthusiast in this story is Musk’s grandfather Joshua Haldeman, who moved his family from Canada to Pretoria in 1950 to live under the newly elected National Party government and praised South Africa as the leader of “White Christian Civilization.” This is the white nationalist nonsense of their grandparents. Heidi Beirich of the Southern Poverty Law Center described the revival to the New York Times in April 2018.
All the talk right now among people in the alt-right and the broader white supremacist movement is about the need for a white ethno-state. And when you praise Rhodesia, in this context, what you’re praising is violence to that end.
Now that their network staffs the American federal government, with Thiel protege JD Vance in the vice presidency, Thiel’s Founders Fund co-founder Ken Howery in the Copenhagen embassy, and David Sacks running AI policy, the “colony” plan just became a taxpayer-funded project called “Colonize Greenland”.
Yes, I know Musk wears “Occupy Mars” shirts, despite announcing in April 2016 that SpaceX would land a Dragon capsule on Mars as soon as 2018, a mission cancelled the following year.
Yes, I know “Occupy Mars” really means find a territory without laws to create a white nationalist enclave, not unlike Swakopmund, the former German colonial town in South African-occupied Namibia where Peter Thiel spent part of his boyhood while his father worked as an engineer on the Rossing uranium mine under apartheid labor rules. Swakopmund held a concentration camp during the 1904 to 1908 genocide of the Herero and Nama, and its German community was still known for celebrating Hitler’s birthday and giving Hitler salutes when the Thiels arrived.
On 20 April 1989 (Hitler’s 100th birthday) the Nazi flag was flown in Swakopmund (Woermannhaus Tower, at the corner of Bismarck and Kaiser Wilhelm), twelve years after the Thiels fled approaching Black majority rule for a white flight enclave in California.Fast-forward to now and a one-year-old Texas SPAC has landed its drilling containers on the East Greenland coast without permission, after falsely telling a village meeting it had approval, as if it has landed on Mars. Its chairman is a serial SPAC promoter with over ten shell companies behind him. Its budget is $60 million for what is now a single well. To put this in perspective, it’s in a basin where Cairn Energy drilled eight wells in 2010 and 2011, spent over a billion dollars, and found nothing commercial. And its media strategy is a Dr. Phil documentary.
In other words, this has absolutely nothing to do with oil.
Greenland is the new Mars for the white nationalists. The oil story is just a retail tranche of a much older propaganda circuit: the continent as a single engineered resource unit, run by experts and capital instead of voters. “Technocracy Inc.” drew that map in the 1930s and called it the Technate of America. It included Greenland.
Keep in mind how much it matters that Musk’s grandfather led the movement in Canada until his 1940 arrest. Thiel wrote in 2009 that he no longer believed democracy and freedom were compatible. Their people now hold the Greenland portfolio and it’s all about “colonization”.
| Player | Position | Technocracy Aim |
|---|---|---|
| Peter Thiel | Founders Fund; backer of Praxis and seasteading | Exit from democracy; declared it incompatible with freedom in 2009; sovereignty for capital |
| Elon Musk | Grandson of Joshua Haldeman, Technocracy Inc. leader in Canada, arrested 1940 | The Technate inheritance; engineered governance from DOGE to a Mars city he calls Terminus |
| Ken Howery | Co-founded Founders Fund with Thiel; US Ambassador to Denmark, holding the Greenland portfolio | Reported by Reuters to take the Greenland “freedom city” seriously while leading acquisition talks |
| Dryden Brown | Praxis co-founder, Thiel-backed network state venture | Flew to Greenland to buy it in November 2024; pitched a “mythical city in the north”; Praxis posted “According to plan” when Howery was named |
| Marc Andreessen, Joe Lonsdale | Venture capital, DOGE advisers | Reported backers of the freedom city; Lonsdale called for “expanding our country to Greenland” |
| Larry Swets | Chairman, Greenland Energy (GLND); ten-plus SPACs sponsored | The retail tranche: a $215 million Nasdaq listing sold on a $1 trillion claim from reprocessed legacy seismic |
| Jeff Landry | Louisiana governor, Trump’s Greenland envoy | Promises oil pumping next year, a physical impossibility on any Arctic timeline, because the promise is the product |
The connections run through two men.
- Howery co-founded Founders Fund with Thiel and now sits in the embassy that governs American interests in Greenland. Thiel backs Praxis, whose founder tried to buy the island and celebrated Howery’s appointment as part of the plan.
- Musk carries the Technate by blood and by conduct: his grandfather mapped Greenland into an expert-ruled superstate ninety years ago, and the grandson built the unaccountable efficiency directorate that treats elections as legacy code.
The SPAC, the freedom city, and the missile defense basing are three products written against one underlying asset, which is valued more for what it lacks than what it has: only 57,000 people on 2.1 million square kilometers, and sovereignty fractured three ways between Nuuk, Copenhagen, and Washington.
It’s all just “terra nullius“.
Everyone keeps asking what is the economic or military justification, what’s under the ice or in the geographic vicinity. Wrong questions. It’s a trick.
The asset is the absence of voters. It’s the absence of laws. It’s the suitability for repopulating the white race, the Rhodesian fantasy Thiel and Musk were raised on.