Name: The American rare earths company seeking to topple China's dominance | 60 Minutes
Uploaded: 2026-03-23T21:33:36.000Z
Duration: 13 min 6 s
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Last week, President Trump postponed a summit with his Chinese counterpart on account of the war with Iran.

When Trump and Xi Jinping do meet, here's an agenda item bound to figure prominently: rare earth elements.

Relative clauses (Restrictive vs. nonrestrictive)

Right now, China holds a near monopoly over these strategic metals that are key components in so much that makes the modern world go: smartphones, robotics, EVs, also fighter jets, drones, and

That is, China controls materials essential to America's ability to wage war.

Tonight, the story of an American company confronting this elemental crisis.

It mines rare earth elements, processes them, and makes them into super-powered magnets.

And it's part-owned by us, American taxpayers, in an unusual deal crafted by the federal government.

In our southwest of Las Vegas, in the guts of the Mojave, mountain-passed California might be the ultimate front of our trade war with China.

Behold the only active rare earth mine in the U.S.

Are we stepping on rare earths as we speak?

And Michael Rosenthal and James Latinski are the unlikely men in charge.

Two Floridians in the snow, two finance types suddenly trafficking and mining in metallurgy.

You have no background in geology, and now you're running the biggest rare earth mining business.

the idea that this entire supply chain was on the other side of the world in China, it just occurred to us that someone had to help fix this problem.

The Trump administration is keenly aware of the problem of China's rare earth dominance.

Doug Burgum is Secretary of the Interior.

If you have a cell phone, have a laptop, if you drive a car, then you're touching rare earth minerals and rare earth magnets.

It's essential to everyday life, but it's also essential to aerospace, telecom, defense systems.

According to the military, one F-35 fighter jet contains about 100 pounds of rare earths incorporated into its various parts.

defense industry is subject to the whims of China and Xi Jinping for military technology?

Well, this is one of the reasons why President Trump created the National Energy Dominance Council with a broad set of objectives.

One of those was to make sure that we had secure supply chains for critical and rare earth minerals.

Right now, we don't have secure supply chains of rare earths because China has cornered the market.

They also weaponize it because if anybody in the rest of the free world said, "Hey, we're going to start mining or we're going to start refining," then they would target that particular mineral, dump a quantity onto the market, drive the price down,

companies that were profitable, suddenly became unprofitable.

Before we proceed, let's dispense with the misnomer.

Here's what is rare: sites with high enough concentrations of rare earths and accessible enough locations to make extraction worthwhile.

In their purest form, rare earths aren't rocks but elemental metals.

Deep cuts on the periodic table, numbers 57 through 71 in two others for those scoring at home.

Lanthanum, cerium, praseodimium, neodimium, samarium.

Julie Klinger is a professor of environmental studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and

a rare earths expert who's visited mines worldwide and written extensively on the subject.

The thing that distinguishes rare earth elements are their fantastic magnetic, conductive, and optical properties.

So they're used often the way you might use spices in cooking, because if you add just a little bit of a certain rare earth element, say, to a magnet, that enables that magnet to be both very small and very powerful.

Geologists found rare earths at Mountain Pass in 1949.

By the '60s, individual rare earths were being mined, separated,

and utilized, not least uropeum, which enhanced the color red in early television sets.

Then, in 1982, researchers found that another, neodimium, strengthens magnets.

And these super-high-powered magnets are used in everything from making your cell phone buzz to the navigation components for drones and smart bombs to high-speed rail and electric vehicles.

For decades, Mountain Pass was the world's rare earth mine.

But gradually, then suddenly, mining and magnet-making began moving offshore.

Familiar story: China could do it cheaper.

It's a difficult business to really break even.

In the 1990s, Mountain Pass fell victim to economics and to environmental regulators after radioactive water leaked into the desert.

The mine languished for a decade, until a new company, Molycor, tried unsuccessfully to compete with China and revive the business.

James Latinski was running a Chicago hedge fund looking for value in distressed companies.

When Molycor filed for bankruptcy in 2015, Latinski glimpsed opportunity.

When you're running a hedge fund, there's not much tangible to it.

And then I made the mistake of going out and looking at the site and seeing the assets.

Actually seeing what your investment looked like.

And I was just blown away by the scale of the assets.

This massive open pit, these concentric circles, a mine 3,000 feet across, 600 feet deep, with one of the world's richest deposits.

Latinski turned to Michael Rosenthal, then working for a New York hedge fund.

The two were close friends growing up, and they decided to partner.

You appreciate the absurdity of the story.

When they bought the mine in 2017, it was underwater, financially and literally.

Thirty million gallons had puddled at the bottom.

They called their new company MP Materials and got the mine back up and running.

Blasting earth, then crushing rocks into gravel, then milling it into fine powder.

Latinski took over the business as CEO, while Rosenthal spent long days on site becoming an expert on rare earth mining and refining.

How do you characterize the division of labor here?

I get dirty, and Jim explains what we're doing.

Today, Mountain Pass employs more than 700.

I cannot get over how extensive and intensive all of this process is once you're done with the actual mining.

Separating the rare earths from the rock and then each other.

After investing hundreds of millions of dollars, it was able to refine neodimium and praseodimium to 99.9 percent purity.