I can't remember if I read it or caught a sound byte on Bloomberg radio. Anyway, it was about Elon Musk saying he needs his own battery manufacturing company. I found this interesting.
Many decades ago, there was the famous Ford Company Rouge Plant in Detroit. All the raw materials necessary to make a Model T Ford car showed up at one end of this huge manufacturing plant and out came a finished car at the other end headed for a Ford dealer near you.
It must have been incredible. In David Halberstam's book, The Reckoning, about the rise and fall of the US auto industry, he wrote that Henry Ford's real pride and joy wasn't the car, it was his factory.
Elon Musk knows the Chinese mainland produces 80 percent of the world's lithium. Maybe Elon realizes the 20 percent that can be mined elsewhere makes his company vulnerable to whatever these producers ask for a kilogram of the stuff, much less what the makers of the batteries would charge his company that go into the cars his company makes.
Elon Musk may be viewed as something of an eccentric. In my view, he is also something of an astute businessman.
