The 33-Year-Old Tesla Alum Begging His Fellow Tech Bros to Ditch Their Desks and Head Back to the Mines

For the tech moguls who have invested fortunes in frontier AI labs, the lifestyle is romantic, but the work is practical. “Silicon Valley cares about this because data centers are made of metal. That’s it,” one executive at a mining start-up tells me. “They’re levered to the tits on a big bet that depends on the build-out of AI infrastructure.”

Demand for copper, which is for wiring in data centers, will increase by 50% by 2040, according to the data company S&P Global. At the same time, America’s energy consumption is expected to skyrocket, prompting a scramble to build nuclear reactors, solar farms, and natural gas power plants, which will require even more critical minerals like lithium, cobalt, nickel, and copper. Today, China has a “near-total dominance” over the critical-minerals market, according to the Council on Foreign Relations.

There’s now a critical-mineral start-up for every preferred brand of cowboy. Want to explore the open ocean? Try Wetstone, which is pursuing deep-sea mining rights. More of a space cowboy? AstroForge has raised $55 million to mine metals on asteroids. Prefer trekking through foreign forests? KoBold Metals, which has raised $1 billion from investors including Andreessen Horowitz and Jeff Bezos, is using AI to discover untapped minerals in places like Zambia. And Uber founder Travis Kalanick just announced a $1.7 billion equity investment to build “physical AI,” including autonomous mining machines at the Iraq–Saudi Arabia border.

All these companies offer some version of the same promise: In order to keep up with the demands of AI, we must use AI to usher in a new era of ore discovery, mining, and refining—one that is safer and more efficient. But there’s a reason mining is not typically a venture-backed industry: It’s massively expensive. “A hundred million dollars is literally nothing in the mining industry,” says Robert Friedland, the billionaire founder of Ivanhoe Mines. “I mean, just on one project in Mongolia, just to see whether the metal was there, we’d spend a couple billion dollars drilling.”

Morgan Bazilian, a professor of public policy at the Colorado School of Mines, says that Silicon Valley can pour all the capital it wants into new-age mining: It won’t change the fact that it’s a brutal industry plagued by a shrinking labor pool and stunted by permits that can take a decade to get. “Digging up ore is a totally different thing than whether you can raise money in Silicon Valley,” Bazilian says. “A lot of those companies will go bankrupt.”

So why, then, are young men, armed with hundreds of millions of dollars, heading back into the mines?

Historically, one of the biggest challenges in mining has been finding people who actually want to mine. While the gold rush may have kick-started an era of large-scale American mining, public sentiment curdled over the next century: Between the environmental impact and backbreaking labor, people wondered if it was too high a cost.

“It’s very difficult to convince people,” says Bazilian, “because they’ll say to you, ‘Well, why do I have to go into a mine and not sit in my little coffee shop in Santa Cruz?’”

By the early 2000s, America’s mining industry was shrinking as China’s was rapidly expanding. “Not only did we cede the actual structures of this manufacturing supply chain, but also all of the workforce,” Bazilian says. He estimated that, while America produces about 200 mining engineers every year, China graduates several thousand.

Caldwell saw China’s mining dominance firsthand after graduating from Stanford University with a degree in mechanical engineering: He worked at a company designing thermal systems for commercial buildings before getting hired at Tesla. Over the next decade, he helped build its Gigafactory Nevada facility and develop its battery-cell-manufacturing technology, which sent him across Asia to source materials. “Regardless of where minerals were being mined and where end products were being fabricated, everything was actually going to China and back out to the world,” he says.

Before Caldwell’s bet has a chance to pay off, he will need to recruit Stanford graduates like himself (as well as mining veterans) and convince them to leave their prestigious careers sitting in front of a screen all day and adjust to the rugged pioneer lifestyle that was once the model of American masculinity.

It hasn’t been as hard as he thought. In an increasingly digital world, landing a high-paying job at a company that makes something physical has become its own kind of clout among America’s tech bro set. “The thing with being at Jane Street or McKinsey or Goldman or whatever else, they’re all the same fucking job,” says one start-up executive who left a career on Wall Street to go into mining. “You realize that all this prestigious stuff that you were trying to do is just not actually all that interesting.”

There’s a thrill, he says, in telling your friends who are still at their consulting gig, “Oh, I’m on site in Central Africa right now.”

Many of the mining founders tell me that employees view their pioneering lifestyle as a feature, not a flaw. KoBold Metals has mandatory trips for everyone—whether they’re a miner or software engineer—to work for a few weeks on site at mines in Sweden, Arizona, or Zambia. The KoBold Metals team tells me it’s a hit among employees and there’s a waitlist to go on multiple trips.

For start-ups like Mariana and General Matter, a uranium enrichment start-up backed by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, there’s an appeal to trading urbanization for Americana small-town life. General Matter founder Scott Nolan says that many of the employees end up enjoying life at the enrichment facility in Paducah, Kentucky. “When people get to experience it firsthand, many of them don’t want to live in California anymore,” he says.

All these companies are also benefitting from a generational sense of ennui, driven by the very technology they’re working to supply. While it’s unclear exactly how AI has impacted the job market, data suggests that computer science majors are hurting: One 2025 Stanford study found that, since the launch of ChatGPT, there has been a 20% employment decline in entry-level jobs for software developers. Other research also showed that, for the first time in two decades, there has been a drop in enrollment for computer science majors.

KoBold Metals CEO Kurt House says that there’s a perception in Silicon Valley that AI will kill many—if not most—purely software companies. If anyone can spin up a replica of your product in minutes, how will any young scrappy founder survive? “If you’re not Anthropic or a handful of companies that make the frontier models,” he says, “What are you going to do?”