Eric Johnson

It's absolute boom when we're all getting excited about it.

That never came to pass.

So the price has come back, but it's nowhere near the heights that we once saw at the peak time, sort of early, around about 2018, 19 and so on.

The reason being is because there's a lot more capacity in the market.

There's a lot more production.

When those big prices were up, everyone was

launched their own lithium mine, and now all those mines are starting to ramp up and feeding into the market.

So there is capacity in the market, and the market would be self-adjusting in the way that some of the existing mines have capacity to increase if prices do go up, whereas previously the market just didn't have lithium when everyone was scrambling for it.

The one thing, it's not only EVs, but you've got to think about long-term demand.

If this thing was over tomorrow, would we still all run to EVs?

I don't know.

Maybe we would, maybe we won't, but that's one factor.

One thing that is now really underpinned before the Iran issue came up, these big batteries, utilities are deploying them all around the world and they consume a lot of lithium.

And that's the thing that's actually been moving the dial.

Ed, great to be here and congratulations on your scoop and great reporting.

Yes, what we're hearing is a $30 billion raise, which if you look at the history of SpaceX, Musk is known for his grandiose visions.

They're building Starship, a colossal rocket, which he expects to put humans on the moon and eventually one day go to Mars.

so the money could be used for that.

He also has talked about, as you mentioned, the idea of putting data centers in space, harnessing solar power and having a huge amount of computing resources in space.

They would need to buy chips to do so, so the money could be used for that.