# MP Materials The company that owns Mountain Pass, California — the only rare-earth mine in the United States and the largest deposit in the Western Hemisphere — and, since July 2025, the company in which the Pentagon is the largest shareholder. It sits at the mining end of the [[Critical Minerals]] chain, upstream of refiners like [[ReElement Technologies]] and magnet-makers like [[Vulcan Elements]], and is the template entry on the [[Government Equity Stakes Roster]]. ## From Molycorp to the Pentagon Mountain Pass supplied most of the world's rare earths from the 1960s to the 1990s, lost the market to China on price and environmental cost, and went through Molycorp's 2015 bankruptcy before a group led by hedge-fund manager James Litinsky bought it in 2017 and took it public as MP Materials in 2020. The awkward fact of that decade was that MP's concentrate went to China: Shenghe Resources, a Chinese state-linked company, took a stake at the founding and was the offtaker for nearly all of Mountain Pass's output, because there was nowhere in the United States to refine it. MP built its own separation capacity from 2023 and a magnet plant in Fort Worth, and in April 2025, when Chinese retaliatory tariffs made the shipments uneconomic, stopped sending concentrate to China altogether. The **[[MP Materials DoD Rare Earth Partnership]]** of July 2025 is what filled the gap: $400 million of preferred stock and warrants (about 15% if converted), a $150 million loan, a ten-year **$110-per-kilogram price floor** on neodymium-praseodymium, and a commitment to buy all the magnets from a new "10X" plant for ten years after it opens — executed under Title III of the [[Defense Production Act]]. The price floor is the decisive term: it removes the risk that Beijing floods the market and prices the mine out of existence, which is how every earlier American rare-earth venture died. A week later Apple signed a $500 million supply agreement with a $200 million prepayment; later in 2025 MP took a 49% stake in a Saudi joint venture with the state miner Maaden and the Pentagon. The stock rose about 270% in 2025. ## Why it matters here MP is the clean case of [[American State Capitalism]] — no White House intervention has been reported in its selection, unlike the [[Vulcan Elements OSC $620M Pentagon Loan]] next to it on the roster — and so it is the one that tests the model on its merits: a guaranteed price and a guaranteed buyer are closer to a wartime production contract than to an investment, and the equity is the government taking a share of upside on a business it is simultaneously underwriting. [[Permanent Magnets and the Rare-Earth Supply Chain]] has the industrial logic; [[Office of Strategic Capital]] the Pentagon's lending arm; [[Advanced Materials Ecosystem]] the sector. ## See Also - [[MP Materials DoD Rare Earth Partnership]] · [[Government Equity Stakes Roster]] · [[American State Capitalism]] · [[Defense Production Act]] - [[Critical Minerals]] · [[Permanent Magnets and the Rare-Earth Supply Chain]] · [[ReElement Technologies]] · [[Vulcan Elements]] · [[Vulcan Elements OSC $620M Pentagon Loan]] - [[Office of Strategic Capital]] · [[Advanced Materials Ecosystem]] · [[China]]