#AIS: MP Materials CEO James Litinsky on rare earths, supply chain, and energy independence

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (0:00)
Okay, so I want to introduce somebody. This is an incredible story of a turnaround of a business that impacts a lot of us in America, if you care about climate change, etc. His name is Jim Litinsky, and here's a guy who had all the success in the world, running a hedge fund successfully.
A business called Molly Corp goes into bankruptcy.
He basically puts his entire fund in it, and brings it out of bankruptcy, manages to build one of the first mines that was completely cleared. You heard what Elon said about California, in California, that mines some of these rare earths and critical metals that we need to make permanent magnets that we use in electric motors.
On the front lines of climate change, building factories now in South Carolina with GM, etc. etc. So Jim's just going to walk you through a few things, and we're going to talk about some climate change stuff after.

**James Litinsky** (1:12)
Hey, everyone. So I'm Jim. I used to run a hedge fund, and now I'm an accidental industrialist. So I want to take you through that journey. And then while I do that, it'll go through the problem that I'd like to solve. Just to provide some context. So I think if we think about a lot of the things that just came up with respect to the economy, it's been about a decade plus since the global financial crisis. And in that decade plus, we've been in this environment where there's been essentially a full-on boom, a lot of money printing, and essentially a very low or negative cost of capital in growth, in technology, right? And what we've seen now, I guess, we're on the beginning stages of the aftermath of experiencing that economic enema, as was just discussed. But we have just been through this period of over a decade where there's been all this money that has gone to growth. And what has happened during that time simultaneously is the real economy has been starved.
You haven't seen, I doubt many of you have friends that are investing in new steel mills or aluminum mills or nickel mines, maybe nickel mines now, right? But while the real economy has been starved, actually, interestingly, we haven't noticed it so much, one, because we're just starting to scale into electrification.
But China has made investments.
So pretty much all of the incremental steel and aluminum and commodities capacity in the world over the last decade has come online because, you know, China has led the way. And, you know, as an aside, interestingly, about 80% of the aluminum and 80% of the steel production in China is done with coal. So not only has this been, you know, not only have they sort of taken over the real stuff, and this isn't about, you know, wherever you are on the spectrum of, you know, are they just a really tough competitor? Or is this, you know, some kind of economic World War III? It doesn't matter. What matters is, is that the incremental stuff in the real world has really, the way has been led by China. And so when we think about what's now happening in the world as we electrify, I want to move on to the next one here.
I think one good thing about going after Elon is I don't have to really explain this chart.
We are electrifying. And as we electrify, what a lot of people might not fully understand is that while all this real stuff has come online, the Chinese have actually moved downstream very intelligently. And so when we think about a lot of people may have heard of China 2025, but a lot of people probably haven't heard of China 2035, which is the current MO, which is to move downstream into standardization. And so actually when we look around the world today, four of the top ten OEMs are Chinese by global battery electric share.
And so when we think about the single largest private employer in the country, the auto industry, we think about all these industries that are mineral intensive, the Chinese are actually have moved downstream. And these are very mineral intensive industries. So what this slide shows is as we go from a fossil fuel world to an electrification world, which we all, I think everyone in this room believes is fake complete.
And this actually excludes steel and aluminum.
Just in the content of copper, nickel, lithium, and then what I focus on, rare earths and some of these other things, there's seven times as much content. And so when we think about the past of the fossil fuel driving geopolitical gamesmanship, and power in the world, the future is about minerals.