Who could benefit from the first mine to exploit rare earth in Greenland? Most likely, the United States, the European Union, and Saudi Arabia. But among those who would benefit, is there any famous figure?
The answer is yes: Donald Trump Junior, the son of the President of the United States.
The key lies in the town of Qaqortoq, in the southern tip of Greenland, about 490 kilometers straight line - just the distance between Madrid and Lisbon - from the island's capital, Nuuk. There is the Tanbreez deposit, which is actually an acronym for the following names in English: tantalum (tantalum), niobium (niobium), rare earth elements (rare earth elements), and zirconium (zirconium). These minerals are essential in mobile phones, wind energy turbines, screens, electric car batteries, and computers. Their extraction and refining are monopolized by China.
The company granted the exploitation, Critical Metals, has signed contracts to sell 37.5% of the production to Europe, another 37.5% to the United States, and the remaining 25% to Saudi Arabia. The company presents itself as an example of what in the United States is called "patriotic capitalism," even though it can be applied Groucho Marx's maxim of "these are my principles; if you don't like them, I have others," only in terms of nationality. It is headquartered in New York and listed on the NASDAQ, the largest stock exchange in that city. But its owner is European Lithium Limited, which has offices in London, Vienna, and Australia, although its headquarters are in the tax haven of the British Virgin Islands. European Lithium Limited only owns 51% of the capital of Critical Minerals and, with the stock rising like a rocket, it is selling shares non-stop.
And that control is being assumed by American financial institutions. Among them, a venture capital fund called 1789, which, through intermediary companies, acquired between 8% and 12% of the owner of Tanbreez in 2025, just a month after the U.S. State Bank announced the opening of a credit line of $120 million (103 million euros) on very favorable terms for the project.
1789 had been established in 2022 by three Trump megadonors, including Rebekah Mercer, the daughter of the main financier of the president's 2016 campaign, Robert Mercer, who introduced him to his former campaign manager and ultra-ideologue, Stephen Bannon. Curiously, on November 10 of last year, just five days after Trump won the elections again, the trio became a quartet: Donald Trump Junior joined as a partner in the fund, with the same rights as the founders.
Donald Trump Jr. (center), during his visit to Nuuk, in January 2025.AP
So Tanbreez, which is currently the only rare earth mine in Greenland, has the backing of the United States Government and is the key for 1789 to obtain a wonderful capital gain. Critical Metals has achieved what some operators call "the Greenland peak," with a 217% increase in the share price since, on January 2, euphoric after the capture of Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro, Donald Trump began talking about conquering Greenland "peacefully or in a more difficult way."
The vast majority of Greenlanders are unaware -rightly so- of the financial maze of Tanbreez. But the mine -which has not yet extracted a molecule of mineral for commercial use- represents one of the most deeply rooted fears on the island: economic colonization. Greenland is a colony -as its inhabitants and the Danes themselves call it- that was conquered without firing a shot. When the then Kingdom of Denmark and Norway began colonizing the island in 1721 (incidentally, 62 years before the United States became independent from the United Kingdom), it did so through the establishment of trading posts.
First, they exchanged iron weapons for furs. Then, firearms. In the western part of the island, facing Canada and with a milder climate, several whaling factories were established in the 17th and 18th centuries, where Spanish sailors and whalers from the Cantabrian Coast played an absolutely key role. In the East, things were slower, largely because, literally, there was no one living there. When Denmark granted independence to Norway in 1905, that country tried to maintain sovereignty over a part of the East of the island with a network of trading posts, each formed by two people who had to be there for two consecutive years.
After an international court gave control of that section to Denmark, Copenhagen had to establish a system of sleds operated by the military to demonstrate that the region was inhabited and, therefore, Norway could not apply the concept of terra nullius ("land belonging to no one") to colonize it. So when on January 2 Trump laughed at Denmark saying that "they have put one more sled" to defend the island, he was actually referring to a historical fact.
But that is a thing of the past. Today, in Nuuk, there are increasing numbers of Danish soldiers. They can be seen at hotel entrances, with their duffel bags, and in rental apartment buildings and barracks in the Qinngorput neighborhood on the outskirts of the island's capital. At the dock where the state-owned trawler Avataq was moored on Thursday, yesterday the Danish offshore patrol vessel Thetis was docked, a ship specialized in long voyages in the Arctic that dwarfed the Ejnar Mikkelsen, whose presence has been conspicuous in the waters surrounding Nuuk.
The possibility of an American economic invasion worries the Greenlandic Government a lot. Since January 1, every foreigner will need to have lived as a resident in Greenland for at least two years, paying taxes in the territory, to be able to have the right to acquire an apartment or obtain a land assignment without a time limit. Likewise, any foreign investor who wants to acquire more than 25% of a Greenlandic company must request administrative authorization.
In the context of the current crisis with the United States, it is foreseeable that the island's government, which has full authority to authorize or reject investments in strategic sectors - including natural resources - will take extreme precautions to prevent the entry of companies from countries considered hostile, among which the United States stands out. However, this won't be easy, as exemplified by Critical Metals, a company that, depending on how you look at it, is American, Australian, from the EU, British, or from the Virgin Islands, and in which a fund linked to a relative of Donald Trump has recently invested. Nuuk is not Beijing.
Its investment control capacity is limited. Last week, in the American magazine Foreign Affairs, Jeremy Shapiro, Research Director at the European Council on Foreign Relations, described a scenario in which Greenland becomes de facto dependent on the United States through a massive development investment plan orchestrated by Washington that simply eliminates the economic, cultural, and political ties of the island with Denmark and Europe, despite Nuuk's evident Scandinavian character, a city that, due to its architecture, way of life, and the presence of cafes and restaurants, has more in common with a town in Norway than one in Alaska.
The main argument against this thesis is the tendency towards improvisation of the United States in general and particularly the government of Donald Trump. However, Washington is playing this card. The Republican president has dissolved the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), but its consulate in Nuuk still employs a staff member from that organization. Their mission is to coordinate development and investment projects on the island. In 2025, the new U.S. president cut off most of the aid to low-income countries, but not to Greenland, whose citizens have a per capita GDP almost identical to that of Spain, and where the U.S. has shown willingness to finance the construction and laying of a submarine communications cable for $465 million.
Furthermore, this policy may have an advantage given the ethnic division among the Greenlanders. Villads Mølgaard, skipper and co-owner of the trawler Mølgaard, who has traveled across the island fishing cod, turbot, and shrimp, summarizes it best: "In the east, west, north, and south of Greenland, dialects are so distinct that we simply don't understand each other. Those in the east and south at least speak the western dialect, where Nuuk is located, but many people in the north do not." In the northern villages, young people prefer to speak English as a rejection of Danish, which they associate with colonization. A colonization that was not violent but also not friendly, as evidenced by Danish doctors inserting intrauterine contraceptive devices (IUDs) in half of Inuit women between the 1960s and 1970s without their consent to control their population. This led to a halving of the Greenlandic birth rate.
As a Greenlandic person who prefers not to be named says, "so as not to have everyone come after me," no one is without sin. "The last violent invasion was that of the Inuit. They arrived over a thousand years ago, and of the previous inhabitants, the Dorset culture, nothing remains. Not even the DNA."