Victor Vescovo

The prices of those metals have gone down precipitously.

Cobalt is now down to $30,000 a ton, and that's only because there was such an oversupply of cobalt in the last year that the main exporter, the Democratic Republic of Congo,

halted exports of it.

The price of nickel has come down to $15,000 a ton from $70,000 a ton.

It's on the downslope.

If you look at the financial projections of Mr. Barron's company, they are projecting prices to come back up.

that stands in contrast to the technological substitution that's happening for those metals for lithium iron phosphate batteries, and now sodium ion batteries, which are simply batteries that use cheaper materials.

They're not quite as good batteries as those that use nickel and cobalt, but they're good enough.

They're good enough such that the vast majority of vehicles now produced in China with electric vehicle batteries use no nickel, no cobalt, it's all lithium iron phosphate.

So there are technological issues, there are technical ones, and then being a nerdy finance guy like myself, really digging into their financial projections and seeing how they're trying to say that they're going to make lots of money.

I can go into very specific reasons why, but as a financial professional and venture capitalist, I simply don't agree with their numbers.

I think they're fanciful.

It is.

And there's plenty of room for the debate, and they have very strong viewpoint.

But I think they cannot deny the fact that polymetallic nodules really only yield four metals.

Two of them are very common, and two of them are increasingly irrelevant.

And then there's the whole strategic angle with China.

That's been the big pivot that the company did in the last year.

Two or three years ago, they were saying, oh, we're the source for electric vehicle batteries.

Well, I think that narrative wasn't working well.