Tesla offered $325M for Salton Sea startup
desertsun.com
desertsun.com
- 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.
So, recycling for example needs to be a net gain when adjusting for externality's not just a pointless feel good measure. Eco homes are another pointless waste. Want to save the environment live in a condo.
Basically, you can do what you want with your land, but don't hurt other peoples air, water, etc.
PS: Needless to say, rarely do I find people with similar viewpoints.
A significant amount of the total lifetime energy usage of a car is made up by it's manufacture. It is not trivial to say you should always buy something new and more efficient.
All cars have significant manufacturing costs. So saying that making batteries has energy expensive processes isn't an argument that disqualifies EVs. An EV will have much less impact on the environment over its lifetime than a gas-powered car manufactured in the same year.
Put bluntly: if I'm the battery manufacturer, my main goal is a profitable operation, not the end-user's ecological footprint.
If having to "just boil it" means I lose money on the product, then I don't have a business.
Take a close look at aerial images pretty much anywhere in the US SW desert.
EDIT: Just because you can see crunky white stuff from the sky doesn't mean you have a lithium mine on your hands! :-)
>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.
tl;dr: you're both extremely confident, ignorant, and wrong.
- But options for multi-year expiries (because that is how long the disposal will take, after the obligatory lockup)...
- ... in a stock that is 1000x less liquid that your usual AAPL or GOOG...
- ...on a short notice on $325 million worth of stock, i.e. a huge percentage of the free float of the stock, making it impossible to hedge for any bank that offers the collar.
tldr: You are a bit too cocky given your lack of knowledge.
The full $325m would be about 1.5M shares which would be 15,000 options contracts. Quite a bit, but not too far from the current action in some December strikes (the 50 put has 11,883 open contracts).
tl;dr You could quite easily either divest of the stake outright or protect a large portion of it through options.
The average trade volume is as you say 4.45M shares. Selling an additional 1.4M raises the daily trade volume by 31.4%.
Economics is supply and demand. If you increase supply by a massive amount when not changing demand. The price tanks. Effectively you are killing your own price point and this sales strategy isn't in your favor.
More sensibly, tossing out one batch at a time of less than 5% of the market will allow the stock to clear without sinking the market.
So parcel up the 2M into 50 groups of a few tens of thousands and we are cooking with gas.
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.
The beauty of a world which resources are finite is that cheap resources always finish to disappear.
At 400K preorders they will need 840 to 1960 metric tons of Li.
Australia alone produces 13400 metric tons per year, Chile another 12900.
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".
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.
Let me remember that whole military operation in Ukraine is done by Russia to stop Shell from mining of natural gas in Eastern Ukraine.
Had they not been so warhungry in the 90s, they could be a part of EU and NATO now, like Croatia.
Could say the same about Ukraine
Transistria is at border of Ukraine and Moldova, owned by both, with roughly equal populations, but both Moldovans and large part of Ukrainians were at same side. For example, leader of separatists was captured by Moldovan police in Ukraine capital city. Why "conflict" happen if both native nations were at same side?
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.
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 :)
I actually had no idea anyone had trouble with those countries until I visited Vienna and the tourist shops had a bunch of ironic t-shirts with Kangaroos and boomerangs on them and stuff.
Maybe it was because I was in "speaking German" mode, so Austria is "Österriech" vs Australia is "Australien".
I know the EU doesn't have a history of coordinated military action. But if tanks crossed EU borders France, Germany, Britain and Italy couldn't ignore that.
You can't really judge how an alliance will respond to conflict crossing their borders on the basis of how they've responded to conflict outside their borders. Governments and militaries think borders are a pretty big deal!
More generally, there are some people in "the European project" who would like to see a United States of Europe with its own foreign policy and military. But this is pretty unpopular with voters in most member states, so everyone involved is happy to keep that level of integration on the back burner, leaving member states to respond how they like to foreign military conflicts while the EU maintains "We're a pacifist trading union, not a belligerent military alliance or a superstate, shucks we don't even have a military"
Politicians are happy to keep kicking the can down the road on EU military coordination for as long as it's politically convenient. But if an EU member state was invaded, they couldn't do that any more; they would have no chance but to make a decision.
And public opinion is far more likely to support (and may even demand) a tough, belligerent stance if Russian tanks have are invading our allies.
Crimea was part of Russia longer than the US has existed. While its previous host, Ukraine, has only existed as a country for 20-some odd years.
Once the government of Ukraine was overthrown, the people of Crimea had every right to decide to stay or leave. And you will not find a single poll before-or-after not showing an overwhelming support for the latter.
> it was Ukraine snuggling up to the EU that provoked Russia into intervening...
A foreign-lead coup of a twice elected democratic government that put in a puppet regime for the sole purpose of creating problems for Russia is what lead things to the way they went.
Right now, what is happening in the eastern parts of Ukraine is a civil war - resulting from ethnic cleansing, neocon agenda, etc. And what is happening in the west of Ukraine is a total economic collapse from the so called free-trade deals with the EU.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11882467 and marked it off-topic.