A Shrewder Musk Would Have Bought a Lithium Mine

The electric vehicle industry is in a supply crisis: There is not nearly enough raw nickel, lithium and other metals and minerals to build the batteries for the millions of EVs that the industry envisions selling this decade. Every Western EV and battery manufacturer on the planet is more or less in the same jam—none has sufficient battery raw materials to build all the EVs it would like to.

That raises the question: Why is Tesla CEO Elon Musk distracting himself from Tesla, where his stake is valued at $230 billion, to buy Twitter? For less than the $44 billion he’s paying for the messaging platform, he could buy a couple of mining companies and heavily reduce Tesla’s exposure to the metals crisis, by far the single biggest threat to its industry dominance.