Hi everyone. I'm Maggie McGrath Senior Editor at Forbes and my

colleague senior editor Alan Oonsman has a new story out with the headline

Elon Musk's laughable solution to Tesla's child

labor worries. That's a lot of information in one headline and we're going to

break it down. Alan, thank you so much for joining us.

Great to be with you. I have to say as someone who's followed your coverage, I'm aware

of various issues around Tesla's stock price and the health of the business, but I have to say the child

labor worries is a new one.

What's going on here?

Well, you know, this, you know, the issue relates to building electric vehicles and the batteries that power them is very different than the traditional auto industry

and particularly the types of raw materials and metals that go in to a lithium-ion

battery.

There is cobalt, nickel, manganese, all sorts of materials that really weren't an issue for a traditional car.

And so companies that make these batteries have to get these raw materials from all over the world.

It's a huge supply chain.

The Democratic Republic of Congo turns out to be an

amazing source of materials like cobalt and copper and the mining industry there has just exploded.

And so they've become a major supplier globally of COBOLBOL, which is an essential ingredient

for lithium ion batteries.

It helps sort of stabilize the cell and it helps with energy

density as well. And it's a very, very valuable material at one point it was selling

for about $50,000 a ton. It's about half that

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