James Litinsky

In the summer of 2025, the U.S. Department of Defense did something almost unheard of in modern American industrial policy: it took a $400 million equity stake in a publicly traded company and became its largest shareholder. The company was MP Materials. The man across the table was James Litinsky, a former hedge-fund manager who had bought a flooded, bankrupt rare-earths mine in the California desert less than a decade earlier.

The deal came with price floors, offtake guarantees and a mandate to scale magnet production tenfold. Critics immediately labelled it industrial policy by stealth, or worse, a bailout dressed up as strategy. Litinsky's response was characteristically direct. The status quo — near-total reliance on Chinese processing and magnets for everything from F-35s to EVs — was itself the greater risk. What looked like government overreach to some was, in his framing, the overdue recognition that rare earths are not a normal commodity. They are a strategic chokepoint.

The controversy is real. The outcome is harder to dismiss. Mountain Pass is now the only scaled rare-earths mining and processing operation in the United States. Magnet production has begun in Texas. Apple and General Motors are customers. Heavy rare-earth separation is advancing. And the same outsider who once relied on Chinese offtake to keep the lights on has become the central private-sector partner in Washington's effort to rebuild a domestic mine-to-magnet supply chain.