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The Billionaire Boys’ Arctic Club: How Trump and Musk’s Marriage of Convenience Is Already Heading for Divorce
Remember when we all had a jolly laugh at Donald Trump wanting to buy Greenland? Oh, how we chortled at the absurdity of it all — the former president treating sovereign territory like a Manhattan real estate deal. Well, the joke’s wearing rather thin now that he’s refusing to rule out using force to acquire this massive Arctic prize, backed by a coterie of billionaire bros who’ve apparently mistaken global politics for a game of Risk.
I was reminded of this peculiar strain of American imperialism last week while visiting the Churchill War Rooms in London. There, amid the perfectly preserved maps showing the redistribution of territory after World War II, I couldn’t help but notice how the great powers of each era seem to share the same delusion: that everything has a price tag, including other people’s homes.
But this isn’t your grandfather’s imperialism. The new variety comes wrapped in a Tesla-branded bow, with Elon Musk hovering at Trump’s shoulder like a Silicon Valley Rasputin. Within minutes of Trump’s election victory, Musk’s corporate empire saw its value surge by 40%, making Tesla worth more than the next 15 biggest carmakers combined. His fellow traveler Peter Thiel’s Palantir jumped 23%. Not bad for a few hundred million…
