2. Invest hundreds of millions in mine
3. Have mine taken off you by Putin one day when he's pissed off at the US State Department and wants to strut to the Russian electorate
4. Cry
Seriously, you would be utterly insane to invest in Russia at the moment with money from US, UK or EU. The reason Rio Tinto are so reluctant to invest might well be because they know it could be taken off them tomorrow.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11882467 and marked it off-topic.
However I think that effort has stalled in recent past and relations with Russia got a tiny bit cosier, so you might not actually be so wrong after all :)
1) its economy is far too screwed up for the EU to include
2) there's still the Kosovo problem, that won't go away soon
3) Croatia and Slovenia will veto an EU membership of Serbia.
It is more than likely that Serbia will turn to Putin instead - and when Putin says "shut them down", Serbia will comply.
There's no mention that the startup "refused" the buyout, and it was unclear why the negotiations fell apart.
The actual article is simply titled "Tesla offered $325 million for Salton Sea startup".
And here's a quote from the article giving a different picture : "The person with knowledge of the negotiations told a slightly different story, saying Musk shut down all discussions after seeing the $2.5 billion valuation from Jefferies. According to that source, Musk abruptly ended all negotiations after reviewing the valuation, never giving Simbol the chance to present a counteroffer to his proposed $325 million purchase price."
I suppose a "refusal" could be inferred by the lack of their acceptance on the initial buyout offer and their (apparent) rebuttal of a $2.5bil valuation.
For instance, if I offered you a million dollars cash for your house and you came back to me with an appraisal saying it was valued at $20mil... I think it would be clear (or at least strongly insinuated) that you refused my offer of a million dollars.
Thinking that's kinda what happened here? Seems like Elon didn't take to their method of countering and called the whole thing off.
Just my $0.02 and I'm not privy to all the inside-details. Could've gone down entirely different than any of us know.
Plus, it seems like there's a LOT of infighting among the co-founders and previous team. Will be curious to see if more information emerges.
Unfortunately I'm not familiar with how this translates over to US law, but I'd be interested to find out.
I think whoever did their valuation, highly overvalued them. There's no way it would be worth that much unless they already had their own lithium mine or something. It's almost like those Shark Tank entrepreneurs that come and say "but our startup could be worth 20x as much in 10 years..so that's that's our valuation".
- In SoCal there are several areas which have geothermal activity and correspondingly several electric plants based on that
- This geothermal activity raises both hot water and a fair concentration of a brine solution containing many metals
- The lithium isn't mined, they were getting it by processing this brine solution
Based on that, and reading many comments that modern batteries also needs lots of Co, Mn, etc... I wonder if the brine water coming up from this area is basically 'battery soup'? Seems like a lot of potential value that is already being pumped out of the ground by someone else - who considers it a waste product!
The Great Basin is composed of Horst and Graben [1] (i.e. Mountain ridges separating basins) geology. H&G happens when the Earth's crust is stretched. The stretching also makes the crust much thinner than normal -- that's why there are tons of cider cones and old lava flows in the Great Basin region.
>Musk wrote in a June 21, 2014 letter to Simbol CEO John Burba
Jesus. I probably wouldn't have taken this deal either because it's all in stock but damn they must be kicking themselves right now.
I don't mean to disparage Tesla, but rather to emphasize that there's a difference between receiving $325 million in cash, $325 million in blue-chip stock, and these $325 million.
The beauty of a world which resources are finite is that cheap resources always finish to disappear.
Finding this piece really interesting though for other reasons. Had a similar idea for a project based in that area a couple years back. Imperial Valley (in general) strikes me as a HUGELY under-capitalized opportunity at the moment.
As a San Diego native, grew up familiar with it as the cesspool and stink-puddle that it is... but, if you look into the history of Imperial Valley and Salton Sea (and the abundance of mineral-rich 'dust' and other waste) it's actually an extremely fascinating tale.
Anyone want to put a few million into helping establish a similar project? Seems like there's way more than just Lithium to be monetized out there.
- company has promising but not proven scalable means to extract lithium from drilling waste water.
- company gets all stock offer from Tesla which to all intents and purposes is "if tesla succeeds you get rich, if not you fail as well." Not clear what voting rights there were.
- company seems to have not responded one way or another.
And who can blame them - they work for the dream, and the best offer is to take a part of someone else's lottery ticket. Turns out it was a good bet but who knew.
