According to Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, the cost of the metal has gone up more than 480% in the last year.
Elon Musk tweeted Tesla may get into the lithium mining and refining business directly and at scale because the cost of the metal, a key component in manufacturing batteries, has gotten so high. „Price of lithium has gone to insane levels,“ Musk tweeted. „There is no shortage of the element itself, as lithium is almost everywhere on Earth, but pace of extraction/refinement is slow.
