How Much Would Buying Greenland Cost?

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Donald Trump, who has long loved big real estate deals, has made it clear that he’s serious about striking one for Greenland. Never mind that Denmark, which controls the island, says the territory isn’t for sale.

But if a negotiation were to materialize, what would, or should, the United States offer?

David Barker, a real estate developer and former economist at the New York, helped us with the thought experiment. (Barker made waves in 2009 when he argued that the American purchase of Alaska in 1867, for less than 2 cents per acre, was a bad deal from a purely financial investment perspective.) Here’s his back-of-a-napkin math for valuing Greenland, which he estimated could be worth between $12.5 billion and $77 billion.

Alaska might not be the best comparison. Trump has said he wants to acquire Greenland for national defense reasons, which wasn’t the clearly defined case for the Alaska Purchase. (In 2025 dollars, the deal was worth more than $150 million.)

Consider the Virgin Islands instead. The United States bought what were known as the Danish West Indies from Denmark in 1917 for $25 million (about $657 million today) because of national defense concerns. Greenland is obviously much bigger, but in both cases the defensive value is based on location rather than size.

One way of doing the math: Barker suggested using the prices for the Virgin Islands and Alaska as starting points but adjusting them based on the nominal change in gross domestic product for the United States or Denmark to account for both inflation and economic growth. “A bigger economy can afford to pay more, and a bigger economy would probably demand a larger price,” he said.

  • For the low-end valuation, he adjusted the purchase price of the Virgin Islands for the 500-fold growth in Denmark’s G.D.P. since 1917. That implied a Greenland price tag of $12.5 billion.

  • Adjusting the $7.2 million cost of the Alaska purchase for the growth in U.S. G.D.P. produced the high end of $77 billion.

Neither comparison is perfect. The purchase of the Virgin Islands was more recent, while Alaska has a similar climate and size. “The feeling of many at the time of the Alaska Purchase was that the U.S. had overpaid, while this was not true of the purchase of the Danish West Indies,” Barker said.

The approach makes less sense if national defense isn’t the main objective. The United States has long had a military presence on Greenland, and Denmark is a NATO ally, noted Nikola Swann, the global head of governments and multilaterals at SwissThink, a credit markets consulting firm.

Access to Greenland’s stores of minerals like copper and lithium, which are useful for critical technology like batteries and electric vehicles, may be more important to the United States, Swann said.

Barker said basing a valuation on Greenland’s resources could be more difficult. “If Greenland really helps us to defend the U.S., then its value increases with the size of the U.S. economy,” Barker said. “If the only value of Greenland was minerals, then the size of the U.S. economy wouldn’t have much effect on the price.”

The Financial Times suggested that Greenland’s resources justified a valuation of $1.1 trillion, but Barker said the tongue-in-cheek estimate made a dubious assumption. “The U.S. government would not receive the full benefit of resource extraction,” he said. “It would sell drilling and mining rights to companies whose bids would leave room for their own costs and profits.”

Don’t forget other points of leverage. Trump said this week that he could not rule out using military force or tariffs. Denmark’s economy has soared in recent years because of pharmaceutical exports like Novo Nordisk’s Wegovy and Ozempic, which are largely exported to the United States.

“These have been important to recent Danish economic growth,” Swann said, giving Trump an advantage.

There is one thing everyone seems to agree on. Buying Greenland “would be the deal of the century,” Barker said.

The S&P 500 fell on Friday after a robust payrolls report. Employers added 256,000 jobs last month, far outpacing Wall Street estimates, thanks to a pickup in hiring in the retail and health care sectors. The stronger-than-expected report jolted equities and Treasury markets as concerns grew over inflation and elevated interest rates.

The Supreme Court seemed poised to uphold a law that could ban TikTok. On Friday, the justices heard arguments in a case challenging a law that requires the app’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, to either sell the social media platform by Jan. 19 or face an effective ban in the United States. A majority appeared satisfied that the law did not violate the First Amendment. The court is expected to issue a ruling as soon as next week.

Firefighters began to contain the Los Angeles wildfires. At least 11 people have been killed and 56 square miles of land have been burned by the various blazes, and more than 150,000 people have been ordered to evacuate their homes. As of Friday, the largest blaze, the Palisades fire between Santa Monica and Malibu, had been 8 percent contained, while the Eaton fire, near Altadena and Pasadena, had been 3 percent contained.

Why would Disney, Fox and Warner Bros. Discovery kill their joint sports venture, Venu, just days after paying millions to settle a lawsuit that threatened it?

They may have been responding to a different type of legal threat.

Disney agreed on Monday to acquire the niche streaming service Fubo, which had filed an antitrust lawsuit against the project. As part of that deal, Fox, Warner Bros. Discovery and Disney paid a combined $220 million to settle Fubo’s lawsuit, and Disney committed to extending Fubo a $145 million loan.

Disney will now own 70 percent of Fubo, and so, beyond any legal question, it may no longer feel there is as strong a business case to team up with others on a rival bundle of live sports programming.

Fubo made exclusive bundles a target. The streaming service’s lawsuit against the three companies targeted their business strategy of creating an exclusive “skinny bundle” of channels for Venu and not offering it to competitors. The only way most cable distributors could get access to those channels would be to buy a package that included other channels they did not want. While that process, known as bundling, has always irked some antitrust experts, Fubo’s lawsuit put a spotlight on potential new skinny bundles sold directly to consumers by media companies in partnerships with one another.

The U.S. District Court judge in the case, who granted a preliminary injunction that delayed Venu’s launch, noted in August that while the legality of bundling was beyond the scope of her decision, “it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that, on balance, these practices are bad for consumers.”

While it wasn’t the sole concern, Disney, Fox and Warner Bros. Discovery were aware the case against Venu could establish a precedent that paved the way for an attack on their core business model.

Settling with Fubo didn’t end legal scrutiny. Shortly after the settlement became public, EchoStar issued a complaint that effectively threatened its own lawsuit. And DealBook hears that the Justice Department, which had already expressed interest in the Fubo case, was not pleased to learn that Disney had acquired a rival apparently to make an antitrust case go away.

The three media giants are also trying to keep “‘big bundle’ alive for as long as possible while they manage the transition to streaming,” Richard Greenfield, an analyst at LightShed Partners, told DealBook. “And it became clear that Venu was going to be counterproductive to that effort.”

Venu’s business proposition was murky to begin with. It wasn’t clear whether its package of live sports could compete with those offered by tech giants or recapture cord cutters. And that package took a big hit when Warner Bros. Discovery lost its National Basketball Association games to Amazon last year.

“It just wasn’t nearly comprehensive enough for most sports fans,” John Kosner, the founder of Kosner Media, a sports and media consulting firm, told DealBook.

What now? Disney’s Fubo deal still needs regulatory clearance. Like Venu, that deal also aims to create a new bundle of live sports programming, but it does not involve three major players. Antitrust experts told DealBook that the dissipation of Venu most likely boosted the odds of approval for the Disney and Fubo deal.

Regardless of the outcome, the “skinny bundle” looks like it is here to stay. A case in point: DirecTV has been weighing its own version. As analysts at MoffettNathanson wrote in a note, that may be good news for Fox, which owns highly valuable sports and news content — and less good news for Warner Bros. Discovery, whose N.B.A. games were one of its primary drivers of subscriptions.

“All said and done, Venu’s impact will live on even as the platform never sees the light of day,” the analysts wrote.

On Friday, Meta became the latest in a wave of companies, including Ford, Walmart and Amazon, to pull back on its diversity, equity and inclusion programs. Such efforts have been under attack by lawsuits, activists like Robby Starbuck and conservative lawmakers, and President-elect Donald Trump has pledged to intensify this pressure when he takes office this month.

Trump has said he’ll “terminate every diversity, equity and inclusion program across the entire federal government.” His incoming deputy chief of staff for policy, Stephen Miller, has led legal challenges to D.E.I. programs.

The Trump administration would wield the most influence over D.E.I. programs at companies that depended on federal funding or held government contracts.

Here are three ways Trump could target corporate diversity programs.

  • Executive orders: In 2020, Trump issued an order banning “malign ideology” like racial sensitivity training for federal contractors and limiting the use of federal funds for D.E.I. programs. Mike Gonzalez, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, the right-wing think tank, told DealBook that he wouldn’t be surprised “to see a repeat of that and perhaps something even more robust.”

  • Rallying a Republican-led Congress: In June, Senator JD Vance, now the vice president-elect, introduced the Dismantle D.E.I. Act, which would prohibit contractors or grant recipients from using federal funds for D.E.I. initiatives. For federally funded private enterprises like health care providers — whose operations rely so heavily on Medicare and Medicaid that it’s impractical to segregate federally funded activities — the bill would effectively ban D.E.I.

  • Investigations and litigation: The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission could use Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits employment-based discrimination, to investigate corporate D.E.I. programs suspected of racial or gender discrimination. Trump’s Justice Department could also leverage Title VI of the same act, which applies to recipients of federal funds, “as a cudgel to threaten federal funding,” said Ishan Bhabha, the co-managing partner and co-chair of the D.E.I. Protection Task Force at the law firm Jenner & Block.

Expect companies to continue shifting their D.E.I. approach to lower-risk strategies, like mentoring initiatives open to all employees and employee resource groups.

For most people, the most notable thing Mark Zuckerberg did this week was announce that Meta would end its fact-checking program, a decision that immediately drew controversy and outcry.

But for a far smaller group, what merited attention was what he wore when he said that.

Watch aficionados quickly clocked that it was a Hand Made 1 by the Swiss watchmaker Greubel Forsey. The company sells just two or three each year — for about $895,000.

The watch was the latest horological flex by Zuckerberg. Collectors had already taken note of his budding interest over recent months, from his admiring an Indian industrial scion’s watch, purportedly a Richard Mille, to his flaunting a Patek Philippe 5236P and a pair of F.P. Journe timepieces.

But wearing a watch from the lesser-known Greubel Forsey drew praise from cognoscenti.

Zuckerberg’s choice is “definitely an ‘if you know, you know’ choice,” said Andrew Freedman, a watch influencer known on Instagram as @hautehand. (His day job: co-managing partner of the law firm Olshan Frome Wolosky and a top adviser to activist shareholders.)

Zuckerberg “enjoys the ultimate ‘if money were no object’ scenario for a newbie collector,” Freedman added. “His selections to date have been spot-on.”

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