Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news.

Not a time effort, money that's been put into this strip.

Like my thought is getting anything is better than nothing.

That's Drew Horn.

He's the founder and CEO of a company called green met.

He was talking to my colleague Joe Doe earlier this spring as the two of them were getting ready to make a site visit.

But this was not your typical site visit.

I confess I have never been, and I'm genuinely curious what it takes to get there.

For the most part, it is you fly out of Newark or JFK, you fly to Copenhagen, and then you have to spend a day in Copenhagen because there's only one direct flight to day from Copenhagen to Nook, the capitol, the capital of Greenland, Greenland.

Joe and Drew were going there to check out what could become a new mine that Drew was hoping the Trumpet ben Is might invest in.

Drew Horn during the first administration was a part of the team that we're supposed to focus on Greenland.

So Drew's been to Greenland like a half dozen or a dozen times in his life.

Greenland as we've established is not easy to get to.

It's part of the Kingdom of Denmark, but it's north of well, pretty much everything.

It's east of the easternmost part of Canada and west of Iceland.

Most of Greenland is covered with snow year round, and so after an arduous forty eight hour journey to Nook, to Greenland's capital, Jode and Drew Horn started their next leg to a place called tan Breeze, named for some of the rare earth elements it contains, tantalem niobium and irconium.

Tan Breeze is a piece of mountain.

It is fairly widely accepted by geologists to be an incredible deposit of rare earths if you can figure out how to get it out of the ground and process it.

Those rare earths are crucial to manufacturing automobiles, airplanes, defense technology, and wind turbines.

China is the number one source of viable rare earth minerals in the world, and that's raised national security concerns.

For years.

President Trump was eyeing Greenland during his first term.

President Trump has been considering the idea of buying Greenland.

Essentially, it's a large real estate deal, a lot of things could be done.

And since Trump returned to office, as the trade war with China has escalated and because of Russi's aggression in Europe, President Trump's interest in Greenland has intensified.

We need Greenland very importantly for international security.

We have to have Greenland.

It's not a question of do you think we can do without it.

Trump said he wanted the United States to take over Greenland and that he won't rule out the use of military force to do it.

The people around the president see the potential of more fisheries, they see the potential of mineral resources, they see the potential of power, hydro electric power.

So I think they look at all of that and say, you have a robust commercial industry that you're starting to build out while also using that business partnership to fulfill the actual national security issues that you want to address.

And I think we're going to get it.

One way or the other.

We're going to get it.

But Greenland is not up for grabs.

And harvesting rare earth minerals there is extraordinarily difficult.

Just getting to the tanbreeze site proved almost impossible.

Drew and Joe were on a tight deadline.

They flew into Greenland on May first, and Drew was due at mar A Lago about a week later.

But when they landed in southern Greenland en route to Tanbreeze, a dense fog rolled.

In and our helicopter pilot, this French pilot came to us first thing in the morning that we're supposed to go and said all flights have been canceled in and out of the region and so we're not flying.

Oh, that's a part of the game in flying in Greenland, decision making because you don't want to be stuck out there.

I'm David Gerrett and this is the big take from Bloomberg News today.

On the show, the Trump administration has big ambitions for Greenland, but what would it take to achieve them and what does Greenland have to say about it.

Jo Doe has spent years covering medals for Bloomberg.

Now his beat is economic state craft, and he's been following the growing interest in rare earth minerals closely.

If you look at any electric engine in an automobile or a wind turbine, you need permanent magnets to keep the propeller or whatever it is the moving parts to keep going in perpetuity.

The rare earth minerals inside those magnets make them strong and durable.

They can withstand very high heat, and so that's why they've always been critically important to the Defense Department, but are now becoming increasingly critical to data centers and artificial intelligence.

Two years ago, China announced it would be limiting exports of certain elements that are used in things like electric vehicles and fiber optic cables, and in April, in response to Trump's Liberation Day tariffs, the country restricted the export of several more rare earths, plus the actual magnets themselves.

All this sent shockwaves across the US because America and the rest of the world rely on China for seventy percent of the world's rare earth supply.

In the scramble to find these minerals elsewhere, one place quickly came to mind.

Greenland.

Not a lot of people live there, and not a lot of people have visited there, but there's a very good understanding mapping of the geology of the island.

As it turns out, that island of fifty six thousand residents is also home to large untapped mineral reserves, gold, diamonds, uranium, and rare earth metals.

These natural resources buried under layers of ice now stand to become more accessible due to climate change.

And that's where Drew Horn comes in.

Drew doesn't own the mind, but he's hoping to be a sort of middleman, someone who can help stand up the mining operation and keep the Trump administration's big picture vision in focus.

A lot of times it's not understood that this isn't just like aerospace in space, like these materials like germanium, for example, it's essential for our entire ground defenses as well too.

Before Drew founded the Green met Minerals Company, he rose up through the ranks of the military.

He served in the US Army Special Forces and then spent time working in the Departments of Energy and Defense during President Trump's first term.

During that time, he learned a lot about Greenland.

I mean, I got to Greenland with him and he goes cool.

I know that first place we're going to have dinner at, and throughout the trip he would constantly order like the thing on the menu that you probably wouldn't order.

We got sushi, and part of the sushi were whale and whale skin and he's like, oh, I love it.

Drew's company, green Mett focuses on commodities and minerals.

He understood that he could leverage his contacts at the DOE and the DoD to marry investors and projects with potential government help.

And he knows how Washington operates, and he's friends with Republicans and Democrats in Washington.

He understands Trump World very well.

Do you think Trump would care if there wasn't a defense aspect of this.

Ah, he might care.

I don't know if he'd prioritize it as much.

When you have that sort of dual focus, that's generally what brings his foreign policy and funding mechanisms combined together in a way that moves the needle.

Indeed, the president's current interest in Greenland does stand beyond rare earths.

As ice sheets melt the Arctic Sea around it could become a busier shipping route and a national security interest for the US.

America's competitors see that too.

Russia has increased its military presence in the Arctic in recent months, and China has also tried to gain a foothold there.

It's also where we fly the missiles over if there is a global escalation on the nuclear scale.

Despite these arguments in favor of expanding America's presence in Greenland, though, Drew can see that the road ahead will not be easy, and on his trip with Joe, he was running into one of the biggest hurdles of getting a commercial venture going.

That's just getting to the mine itself.

So if you're an investor right now and then you potentially couldn't get out to see the site because we're waiting on fogs and you're hearing the stories about you know, how this happens all the time.

Usually that's enough for people to walk away and remember come in the first place.

But Drew wasn't going to walk away that easily.

When the pilots said they'd have to scrap their plan to do a flyover, he and Joe tried to get creative.

We're gonna talk to talk to the boat guys if there's an option to first starting today, we spent the whole day trying to get a small fishing boat to take us around to where the tanbreeze site was.

It sounded like a great idea.

Is the boat even navigate like I don't know like this is a serious question, like with this kind of fun until the owner of the tour ships called up his guy in the fjord where we needed to go, which was a two hour boat right away, and his guy said, well, the fjord still frozen in, so even if you got on the boat, we'd never be able to get anywhere close to the site.

While they waited, unable to get to Tan Breeze, Joe and Drew took an impromptu boat ride along the coastline of one of Greenland's other fjords.

This master, he is all utilite, and you can access it right from the water.

A lot of there, they could see with their his own eyes, tons and tons of valuable minerals like utiolite, which contains irconium, a metal used in nuclear reactors and jet engines.

If you're thinking about this from like just a claimants knuckle dragging procycled like mine, you see that read there, that's like pure paid, that's pure heavy rarer.

Or But for the Trump administration to turn those minerals into something usable, or to establish a larger US presence in Greenland, it's up against challenges far more daunting than the weather.

That's after the break.

So people are going to have it, and I think the people want to be with US.

President Trump has spoken confidently about the relationship he wants the United States to have with Greenland.

Says, you know this, they pick five there, they want to be with us.

He's talked about buying it or taking it by force, but in any case, he wants Greenland to become part of the US.

I don't know really what claimed Denmark, as it would be a very unfriendly actor.

They didn't allow that to happen.

Denmark does have a claim to Greenland because the island is part of the Kingdom of Denmark.

It's a self governing territory with its own parliament and prime minister, but Denmark is still in charge of the island's foreign affairs and defense that is part of Denmark.

Greenland is also a member of NATO, which means the US has had a military presence there for decades.

When Joe was in Greenland, he had a chance to ask a few Greenlanders how they react to President Trump's rhetoric.

What did they tell you about what they've heard from the president.

Yeah, they don't like that.

A number of the people said, yeah, we don't want to be owned by the United States.

We don't even like the rhetoric of the president, the way he's kind of saying things.

And a number of these people said, I like Donald Trump or I like the US, I just don't like the rhetoric that he's using.

And you know, it kind of makes sense, right, Like you know if you suddenly heard the Prime Minister of Canada saying the United States we should probably own the entire northeast or whatever it is, but you probably wouldn't take it.

Well.

Greenlanders on the whole, they don't want to be taken over.

They certainly don't want any sort of military intervention.

And to another point, there is a movement of folks who want independence in Greenland right now.

All the major parties say at some point they want true independence.

So the idea that oh, well, the United States can come and take you over, to many of them, is not that different than their current situation that they want out of.

Kuno Fenker, who's a member of Greenland's parliament and vice chairman of the Legal Affairs Committee, summed it up in February.

Your count purchase Greenland all rights yourself at a determination as non negotiabook.

Tensions have only heated up.

In March, Vice President JD.

Vance was scheduled to visit Greenland on what was initially framed as a family excursion, but protesters there question the true nature of the visit when it turned into a sizable US delegation and ultimately the trip got scaled back from a multi city visit to a shorter targeted trip to one very remote US military base.

During his time there, Vance took aim at Denmark directly.

You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland.

You have underinvested in the people of Greenland.

Vance predicted Greenlanders would seek independence from Denmark.

And I think that they ultimately will partner with the United States.

In response, the Danish Foreign minister posted a video on social media.

Of course we are open to criticism, but let me be completely honest.

We do not appreciate the tone in which is being delivered.

This is not how you speak to your close allies.

In the middle of all this, Greenland elected a new parliament, and the coalition Greenlanders voted in is one that's planning to resist US adventurism, even as the rhetoric suggests a stalemate.

Money is beginning to flow from the US government into projects that look a lot like the ones they're eyeing in Greenland.

In early July, MP Materials, the only rare earth producer in the United States, announced it had secured a one billion dollar loan from two US banks.

The Defense Department promised to invest four hundred million dollars in shares of the company.

Which will make the DoD the largest shareholder in IMP Materials.

Trump has been telegraphing that he wants to invest in projects all over the world to bring rearers and all the other stuff back to the United States.

But the fact that this is actually written on the page is proof that he's serious about it.

And this is just the first thing, and it's a massive thing.

I mean four hundred million dollar dollar equity investment.

I talked to a number of sources, I said, does the DoD take ownership stakes and companies like this?

And they were like no.

In one of them, who's a former Defense Department source of mind said this is a first in class that I can remember.

For Americans hoping to develop Greenland.

This deal marks a turning point when the government goes from talking the talk to walking the walk.

On rare earths.

If it's willing to invest this much in MP materials, the idea is maybe something like the Tanbreeze mine is next.

Everybody who's been around this, like Drew Horn, have been there in the expectation or the hope that eventually the United States federal government in some form will put an investment or give you money to help develop these projects and it could end up being a bet that'll pay off.

As for Drew Horn, he and Joe didn't make it to Tan Breeze on the day they'd planned.

The next day was also foggy, but in the afternoon the fog started to lift.

The next three hours were us determining whether or not we would fly out or not, and the pilot at one point goes, yeah, there's an opening right now, but snow clouds and fogg could come back in and cover the airport and we would have to do some sort of emergency landing elsewhere and potentially be stuck for the night with what I don't want.

He's being stuck in to meadow there.

I said, what are the chances that that would happen?

And he said, I would say there's maybe about a seventy percent chance that we'd get back today.

Well, and I just was like, Okay, I'm out.

But Drew, no surprise was in Joe says.

Drew was visibly beaming when he touched down after his helicopter ride over Tan Breeze.

In all those trips he'd made to Greenland, somehow this was the first time he'd been able to see the site for himself, and the first hand view came in handy at his mar A Lago meeting.

When he got back to the States that week, Drew told Joe that being able to describe what Tan Breeze looks like and why he believes his plan there will work completely changed the conversation with the President's advisors.

Within weeks after Drew Horne went to mar A Lago, Tambreeze received a non binding letter of interest from the United States Export Import Bank for a fifteen year loan to begin work on its pilot project there.

Now, the key here is it's just a letter of interest, and that doesn't necessarily mean anything will come of it, but at the very least it indicates that the project is on the radar of the US government.

This is the big take from Bloomberg News.

I'm David Gura.

The show is hosted by Me, Sarah Holder, Wanha and Seleiah Mosen, Aaron Edwards, David Fox, Eleanor Harrison Dengate, Patty Hirsch, Rachel Lewis, Krisky, Naomi Julia Press, Tracy Samuelson, Naomi Shaven, Alex Sekura, Julia Weaver, Young Young and Takei Yasuzoa make the show.

To get more from the Big Take and unlimited access to all of Bloomberg dot com, subscribe today at Bloomberg dot com Slash podcast offer.

Thanks for listening.

We'll be back on Monday.

He