Elon Musk and his merry band of executive vice presidents had plenty of advice for the mining and metals industry at the company’s Battery Day event in September, where the road map to a $25,000 Tesla was laid out. How easy it is to mine lithium (just add salt), just how much of it there is in Nevada (enough for 300 million EVs), how to be environmentally friendly (“put the chunk of dirt back where it was”) and, given these facts, why miners haven’t been trying harder. Since lithium is “just like widely available”, according to Musk and Tesla’s scientists, they have eliminated other hard to come by metals like graphite (replace it with sand, obvs) and cobalt from batteries (at least in theory ), Musk’s prime raw material worry is nickel. Nickel and dimed Ahead of Battery Day, in an investors conference call Musk had a big shout-out […]