To The Moon

$Tesla Motors(TSLA)$  There have been plenty of analyses floating around warning that China controls rare earth supply and could restrict exports to the United States, which would supposedly hurt Tesla and stall the robotics push. I don't buy that scenario. The United States has more than enough energy for itself and for export, and it's one of the largest food producers in the world. The meeting between Chairman Xi and President Trump looked productive to me, with both sides recognizing that cooperation is the better path. I expect they will cooperate. I don't see a rare earth shortage ahead. China will likely keep supplying what the US needs, and the US will supply energy and food in return.

On AI, it's driving an entirely new cycle and pace of execution. If the US wanted to develop rare earth refining capacity, I think it could do so in less than six months. It could happen in a flash. China likely knows this, and relations between the two countries seem stable, cordial, and productive to me. It's not something I worry about.

The bottleneck is not geology. It's will. Rare earths are not actually rare. Cerium is more abundant in the earth's crust than copper. Deposits sit across the United States, Brazil, Australia, India — scattered, plentiful, waiting. The scarcity the world fears is a fiction. What is scarce is not the ore. It is the refining. China does not dominate rare earth because China holds the deposits. China dominates because it chose to do the difficult chemistry of separation, and to manage the byproducts, while the rest of the world declined the task. Dominance by process, not by nature. And a process can be rebuilt quickly.

Consider the technical case. First, refining is, at bottom, energy applied to chemistry. Cracking, leaching, separation, calcination — each step is power-hungry. America holds an advantage here: energy abundance. The nation that generates power cheaply drives the chemistry cheaply. The one input that governs the whole process is the one input America has in surplus. Second, the hardest step — solvent extraction, separating elements nearly identical in chemistry — used to require years of empirical trial. No longer. The same computational tools that mapped two hundred million protein structures now model a separation train before a single vessel is welded. What took years to tune can now be computed in advance. The technical delay is collapsing. Third, the hardware is not the obstacle. American industry builds rocket-grade pressure vessels in weeks. The tanks, pumps, and vessels rise in months. What cannot be hurried by fabrication is not steel. It is permission. Fourth, the byproducts long treated as curses are, under a systems view, assets. Refining one ton of rare earth yields roughly 1.4 tons of thorium and uranium — both nuclear fuels. Thorium, when irradiated, breeds uranium-233. Global thorium resources could power civilization for centuries. Phosphogypsum, the fertilizer industry's discarded waste, already sits stacked above ground, holding recoverable rare earth alongside more thorium and uranium. The residual fluorine compounds feed refrigerants, pharmaceuticals, and semiconductors. Benefit upon benefit. Almost nothing in the stream is truly waste — if we choose to integrate rather than bury.

The technical verdict is plain: the ore is here, the energy is here, the chemistry is solved, the tools are in hand. This can be built, and built fast. Then why does it not happen? The only remaining bottleneck is regulatory. Some handling is genuinely necessary — thorium is radioactive and must be contained. But containment is achievable in months, not years. The hazard is real; the timeline is not. The delay does not protect the public. It protects incumbents — those whose position depends on America remaining dependent. Whoever stands in the way of clearing that regulation is not a cautious steward. He is serving an outside interest, whether he means to or not, and should be seen plainly as what he is.

That is the sword. Now the shield. America need not even complete the build to win. It need only make the build visibly, credibly real — because the moment China sees it, China's own interest changes. A monopolist who squeezes too hard teaches his captive to replace him, and loses the customer forever. History is unambiguous on this. When Chile held the world's nitrate and priced it as a monopoly, German synthetic ammonia — Haber-Bosch — rose to replace it and destroyed the Chilean trade permanently. The golden goose was killed not by its enemies but by its owner's greed. China knows this story. It is very likely China has already moved to keep rare earth flowing, precisely to avoid teaching America to build in full. For if America develops its own capacity all at once, China is not out-competed slowly — it is shocked out of the market entirely, and that serves no one. So the measured path is the wise one for both. America builds the capability and holds it ready; China keeps the tap open rather than summon its own replacement. The sword makes the shield credible. The shield makes the sword unnecessary. The fears now weighing on the market are, in all likelihood, unfounded — not because the danger was never real, but because the remedy is so plainly within reach.

The bottleneck is solvable. The resource is in hand. What remains is deregulation — and only deregulation. That is what eats time in America. The rest is easy. Max six months to implement.

If America floods the market and China answers by collapsing the price, neither nation wins — they consume each other. It is like the sea star at the bottom of the Antarctic sea, where no other food remains, turning at last upon its own kind: two predators locked mouth to mouth, each devouring the other because there is nothing else left to eat. That is the true cost of the race run to its end — not victory, but mutual consumption. And it is precisely why the wiser course is not the war but the credible readiness to wage it. The nation that builds the capability, and lets its rival see it clearly, need never fire the shot. The sword kept bright is the sword never drawn.

The wisest course is indeed collaboration. We have space to conquer, and that journey is still in its infancy.