The elements of power, p.16
The Elements of Power, page 16
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As they ambled across the factory floor, the investors peppered the rep with questions: How many, how much? The rep smiled and fended off the queries—especially the ones about Tesla’s lithium-ion batteries. Articles proliferating online claimed that the cars made at the factory used batteries from BYD, the Chinese battery company, and Musk had publicly mused about producing a compact car there that included batteries from CATL.
The group passed into the casting section, where molten aluminum was pushed into molds by machines capable of injecting the metal at a pressure of six thousand pounds per square inch. Using the machines, Tesla can trim seventy production steps down to just three.
“We haven’t done a tour like this in a long time—we need you,” a Tesla rep told one of the investors. The investors nodded. In fact, they needed one another. The investors had cash to spend, and the company had positioned itself, and the lithium-ion-powered cars it had pioneered, as the solution to clean transport. Everyone—from the Green politician Ramona Pop, to the European Parliament, to the U.S. Congress, to the titans of finance, to the legions of fans who bought Model Ys and rhapsodized about Musk online—had accepted that lithium-ion would be the solution for mobility, for buses, for the vaguely annoying scooters that were zipping noiselessly down the streets of every major city by the early 2020s. Such people had not factored in the pollution of production. In fact, when all emissions were taken together, Tesla cars were more polluting than hybrid vehicles, but everyone seemed to have bought into the company’s promise of greener transport.
Still, Tesla wasn’t moving as fast as its competitors in China. There, companies like BYD had been steaming ahead with government support long before Tesla even built its first Gigafactory. Beijing was cheering on its domestic companies, but in the U.S. and Europe, businesses such as Musk’s were still regarded with suspicion. In Brandenburg, thanks to environmental regulations, recent plans for an expansion of the Gigafactory and of the battery-production facility had been stymied.
On the investor tour, as molds were pressed and machines clanked, a tattooed Tesla worker connected his phone to the sound system. The music began with a howl. The rep’s explanation of the die-casting process was drowned out by the sound of Fat Joe rapping:
I did it all, I put the pieces to the puzzle
Just as long, I knew me and my peoples was gon’ bubble
One of the investors—a slim British-public-school type with crew-cut red hair burst into a smile. He was sold. “I mean, Fat Joe and Terror Squad—legends,” he said, laughing. “I mean, you just have to admire the hustle.”
Chapter 21
Breaking the ICE
Electric vehicles experienced a turbulent liftoff during the first two decades of the twenty-first century. Even in the mid-2000s, with consciousness around emissions surging, battery-driven cars were still something of a cautionary tale, and almost all the major auto manufacturers were betting on internal-combustion-engine, or ICE, vehicles.
General Motors, the U.S. auto giant, was still smarting after the negative fallout from the EV1, an electric car it had debuted in the decade before. EV1 had been launched by GM in 1996 to much acclaim, but due to lack of demand, it was recalled in 2003, when the company crushed the vehicles for scrap. Environmental activists blamed oil companies, but GM said the cars had lost it large amounts of money.
As late as the second half of the 2000s, hybrid vehicles, especially the flagship Prius, made Toyota into the world’s biggest automaker, a position GM had occupied for seventy-seven years. “Toyota was the darling of the media, the American public,” Bob Lutz, a legendary GM executive who assumed responsibility for global product development in 2005, would later say. One of the driving forces behind the company’s renewed interest in electric vehicles, he remembered the sentiment at the time: “Toyota is light-years ahead. General Motors people are all brain-dead; all they keep doing is internal combustion engines. If only we had the smart people in Detroit [the headquarters of the U.S. auto industry] that Toyota has, the noble Japanese who are not motivated by profit. They’re motivated only for the good of society,” he said. “It was enough to make you sick.”
* * *
In the early aughts, a Los Angeles engineer named Alan Cocconi was telling anyone who would listen that he could make a car that would travel three hundred miles on lithium-ion batteries. “This could be really a very viable solution and could meet most people’s needs for transportation,” Cocconi said. In 2001, Martin Eberhard, a newly minted e-reader millionaire out of Silicon Valley, invested some money in Cocconi’s concept. The tZero, an electric vehicle priced at $200,000, was born.
To build the tZero battery, Cocconi used one hundred blocks of sixty-eight cells, each as big as a standard car battery. The cells were called 18650s because they were eighteen millimeters wide and sixty-five millimeters tall. They contained something that was essentially the original LCO formulation that John B. Goodenough had discovered, as did most of the EVs that followed in those early years.
After the money ran out, Cocconi’s funder, Eberhard, teamed up with a friend named Marc Tarpenning, and they founded Tesla in 2003. Musk invested $6.35 million a year later and quickly took control, ousting the original founders. It would turn out to be unquestionably one of the best investments ever made. By 2014, it was estimated that Musk had made around $2.79 billion from Tesla. In August 2024, the company’s shareholders approved a pay package of $46 billion for him.
In the early days, Musk made sure the Roadster, the car that had grabbed Lutz’s attention, was sleek and sporty and sexy. Moreover, he made sure that it was driven by famous Hollywood actors. By 2009, celebrities like George Clooney, Matt Damon, and Leonardo DiCaprio would all own one. These cars could go from zero to sixty in less than four seconds flat, and the battery was good for 244 miles before it needed recharging.
Innovation tends to happen in two stages: the scientific eureka moment followed by the scaling of that triumphal discovery industrially. Tesla, and Musk, had changed the narrative around electric cars. Now they needed to master the production of those cars. Musk began to plan the Gigafactories that would produce Teslas quickly and cheaply, in a style he would dub “Ultra Hardcore” in a 2012 email to staff. “People put their heads down, worked through the problems, and ramped up that factory,” said Ryan Melsert, a founding member of Tesla’s Gigafactory design team who has gone on to build a battery-recycling business. “I think it’s hard to picture that time, because it wasn’t financially successful; now it is one of the biggest corporations in the world.”
The Gigafactory in Brandenburg was the end result of all that grafting. “Industrial scale is an innovation ladder all unto itself,” Mujeeb Ijaz, founder of Our Next Energy, a billion-dollar battery company in Michigan, told me. “Way beyond technology, industrial scale creates the motivation to do things differently, to do it better, do it faster, to make it cheaper, to localize the supply chain and create the opportunity to drive cost down.”
By the late 2000s, Detroit was starting to wake up. Not only was Tesla innovative, but it was also mastering the art of car production. “I mean, this is outrageous, here is a small start-up car company on the West Coast, obviously, very confident about lithium-ion batteries, is going to go into production with this car,” Lutz said on Charlie Rose in 2011. “Whether Tesla is ever hugely successful or not, I will always owe them a debt of gratitude for having, kind of, broken the ice.”
* * *
Lutz, a natty dresser famous for his crimped-collar shirts and elegant ties, had noticed Musk’s moves at Tesla early on. He understood the need for the U.S. auto industry to innovate. He was no environmental bleeding heart; when he had headed Chrysler in the late 1980s, he had pioneered high-octane vehicles like the Dodge Viper. He had also served as CEO of Exide Technologies, the battery company, so he knew quite a bit about energy storage. He realized that if GM was going to win against Japanese automakers, as he put it, the “only way to stop them was to leapfrog them and do something beyond what Toyota had done.” Lutz was constantly being told that General Motors needed a game changer “to give people a new perception of the company.” The firm turned to its batteries.
Instead of coming up with a hybrid or purely electric car, GM designed something between the two: the Chevy Volt, a “plug-in hybrid” that utilized an “E-Flex” system. Cost was not a strong consideration, Lutz told me. “I thought, Well, there’s no point of just doing another hybrid,” he said when we spoke in 2022. “If we are going to do a green car, I thought we should be doing something that is manifestly and demonstrably better than what Toyota is doing with the Prius.”
The car had a forty-mile range, but to cure the “range anxiety” that had supposedly scuppered the EV1, it had a 1.4-liter engine that would kick in when the car’s battery had drained. When the Volt debuted at the 2007 North American International Auto Show on a stage whose backdrop fizzed and crackled with blue lightning bolts, Lutz stepped out of the vehicle beaming. “The GM electric vehicle is an inconvenient truth,” Lutz quipped, referring to former Vice President Al Gore’s film warning of the dangers of global warming. (Lutz himself was a climate-change skeptic, calling global warming a “total crock of shit” in 2008.) “This is not a PR exercise or a pure show car,” he continued. “This is a real program with real money behind it that is heading for production.”
Chapter 22
Le Petit
By the mid-2000s, people may have been turning to lithium-ion-based batteries to power their vehicles, but the major demand for lithium and cobalt came from handheld devices. Mobile phones had become ubiquitous; by 2002, most of these devices used lithium-ion batteries. “Lithium-ion batteries are the foot-soldiers of the digital revolution,” The Economist contended.
In Congo, more and more people were heading to the southern mines to find the riches by which these devices were powered, especially copper and cobalt. They were banding into loose groups, or cooperatives, in order to sell ore to traders. Copper was used in all kinds of electrical devices, and cobalt was increasingly being used in batteries. On the outskirts of the Kakama mine, business had picked up at Joseph Kufi Kilanga’s tire shop. (As noted, he was Odilon Kajumba Kilanga’s father and the minister Kufi Kilanga’s cousin.) “My father wasn’t rich, but he still had means,” Kajumba told me. “When we wanted something, my father always did his best to get it for us. He was obliged to always satisfy us. Even if he didn’t have money, he would try to satisfy you. In short, he spoiled us.”
Even though production levels for copper and cobalt remained fairly high, the South’s once proud mining industry had become a shell of its former self. Murray Hitzman, the geologist who worked in Congo in those days, saw how Gécamines had been devastated firsthand. “There were some of the best geologists I’ve ever met in my life still working for Gécamines, and they hadn’t been paid for three years,” he said. “Really good people, really good workers, too, at the mines. I couldn’t believe that they just—they were working for nothing. Literally for nothing.” Hitzman continued, “It was just sad, to be honest. It was just sad as hell.”
The scramble for wealth was leading people into ever deeper pits, which became unstable during the rainy season and were wont to collapse, burying miners alive. Artisanal creuseurs even went into the uranium mine at Shinkolobwe, which had provided the material for the first atomic bombs, and carried out radioactive material. “They’re digging as fast as they can dig, and everyone is buying it,” John Skinner, a mining engineer, told the Associated Press at the time. “The problem is that nobody knows where it’s all going. There is no control.” Moïse Katumbi Chapwe, Katanga’s governor after 2007, began efforts to prohibit anyone from entering the Shinkolobwe mine (it had officially been closed since 1960). “I spoke to a lot of foreign ambassadors. I said, ‘This mine remaining like this is a danger for all the world,’ ” Katumbi told me when we spoke in 2019. “A lot of people are going there illegally because it has a high cobalt content and a high uranium content.”
* * *
In an attempt to harness more profit from the mines, Kabila Jr., along with his main adviser, Katumba, and economists from the World Bank, crafted a mining code that was enacted into law in 2002. The new code liberalized the mining sector, provided for Gécamines to sell off its assets, and enshrined artisanal mining into law.
Artisanal miners had to belong to cooperatives and seek permits from a body that was charged with educating them in the ways of mining and organizing them into effective teams. It also established “artisanal exploitation zones” where permitted artisanal miners could work. In theory, there was a slate of rules that provided for best practices, including around safety and a minimum age for miners.
In reality, though, there was little about the artisanal mining sector that suggested the rules were being followed. Children worked in mines, and pregnant women washed minerals. After years of colonialism and dictatorship, there was a desperation to the way that people worked on sites like those around Katanga. The artisanal miners, the creuseurs, were mining to make ends meet. They were often from the very poorest stratum of society in a country that consistently ranked as one of the poorest in the world.
Amid the poverty, a few people smelled opportunity. Atop the heap, reaping gains from mining, were politicians in Kinshasa, most prominently Katumba and Kabila, who were busy creating a system by which the revenues from mining went into the coffers of the elite. Then there were the enablers, the “fixers.” They came from every corner of the globe. One of them was Dan Gertler, who was beginning to buy more mining concessions in Katanga through a company called Fleurette at bargain prices. There was Shiraz Virji, an entrepreneur of Indian extraction who, having started life as a wood and spice trader on the Kenyan coast, founded a business in 2001 called Chemaf, or Chemicals of Africa, which not only bought mines but also built a cobalt-processing plant. There was Billy Rautenbach, the Zimbabwean businessman who had served as head of Gécamines and now ran a company called Boss Mining. And, as always, there was George Arthur Forrest.
Congo’s fixers understood they needed fresh money for their projects, so they looked abroad. Moises and Mendi Gertner, London-based investors, were two people who decided to allocate money to the country’s burgeoning mining scene. They had been told at a wedding sometime in early 2006 by Yaakov Weinroth, the attorney, that Gertler was a “charismatic child prodigy with extensive and unusual connections, who is capable of making a fortune,” so they decided to invest large sums of money with the young Israeli even after he did not repay a loan they issued to him. The connections Weinroth was talking about included Kabila’s sister, Jaynet, and Katumba. “Dan and Katumba have a tremendous relationship,” Mendi Gertner later said during an arbitration resulting from a later disagreement over money. (The 1,200 pages of arbitration documents were provided to me by the Platform to Protect Whistleblowers in Africa.) In early 2006, the Gertners met Katumba in Congo and when he traveled to Israel. “We knew from the outset that Mr. Katumba was the one helping to make things happen.”
Few people understood the power of the artisanal mine, however, like Alex Hayssam Hamze. Often described as a “logistics genius” by the people who knew him, Hamze was the son of a martial arts instructor from the South of Lebanon. With his homeland embroiled in civil war, Hamze’s father went to teach martial arts in Congo. “They left Lebanon when he was two,” an associate of Hamze’s told me. His father soon lost his job and set himself up as a merchant in a small town near the outskirts of Kolwezi.
By the mid-1990s, Mobutu Sese Seko’s wane had ushered in the era of artisanal mining: The Lebanese community of traders in Kolwezi, who had already gained some experience as “cobaltists” during the 1980s, began to buy hand-mined cobalt from Gécamines sites. “It was the Lebanese community who started the market, who started buying and selling, and in the mines that were abandoned by Gécamines,” Norbert Nawiji, a longtime copper and cobalt trader in Kolwezi, told me. “People were pouring in and doing handpicking—collecting of stones from the surface—and they sold to the Lebanese.”
* * *
Hamze and his brother began buying and selling minerals mined by artisanal creuseurs from a mine called Mutanda ya Mukonkota, near the eastern entrance to Kolwezi. He was still in his teens, but he was determined to make money trading like his father.
The Mutanda mine lay on a nature reserve called Basse Kando, established by the Belgians in 1957. During Mobutu’s rule, black antelope and elephant lived in its forestland, and hippopotami bathed in the Kando River. But then gold was discovered at a site called Kawama, or Shabara, and artisanal miners rushed to begin digging there: Rich seams of copper and cobalt were unearthed, the forests were cut down and made into charcoal, and the earth was ripped open. By 2024, according to Jonas Kiriko, a Congolese investigative reporter, around 77 percent of the Basse Kando Reserve would be allocated as mining concessions.
When Hamze began working at Mutanda, it was becoming a desolate strip of wasteland. The gold miners had flushed mercury into the rivers, killing off wildlife. People were scraping together a few dollars a day from the ocher-tinted soil. But amid the devastation, Hamze saw opportunity. “He’s very focused. He understands logistics and numbers innately,” his associate told me. “The guy didn’t even graduate from the Lycée, but he’s a fucking genius, a computer genius, a logistics genius.” In 2002, Hamze set up a trading company called Bazano. He was small in stature, and the Congolese miners began using a sobriquet for him that stuck—Le Petit.
