Happy birthday Mark! That would be quite the present...and ensuing celebration.

I managed to catch the 60 Minutes w/ Elon...very insightful into Elon's business mindset and his background. The man seems to somehow adequately manage running two huge companies while also finding sufficient familiy time (2days Tesla/3days Space-X/2days family). Truly impressive.

Also as impressive was how he had managed to salvage Space-X and Tesla from insolvency a few years ago. Was no idea how close those two companies and Elon were on the verge of bankruptcy. Anyways, takeways from the piece...

Two main takeways:

1. Eco-friendly operations are of utmost importance to Elon. He said something along the lines of his intentions for Tesla was not even for the company to succeed, rather, he seemingly almost expected Tesla to fail as a business. His true intention was to be the driving force behind a movement away from fuel emission vehicles.

2. Though the piece did not detail future resource supplies required for the Gigafactory (not that I would expect that from a high level news piece), it did go in to detail slightly on the main hinderance of Tesla's future growth is it's capacity to produce the batteries and find a way to produce the batteries at lower cost than they are currently being manufactured.
Though it mentioned there are critics who view the gigafactory strategy as being overly-ambitious, Elon is a man with a vision, and given his track record I would not be one to bet against him.

so, tying things back to ZEN....

1- Eco-friendly, CHECK

2a - Capacity to increase battery production (gigafactory), TBD

2b - Lower cost synthetic batteries, still not 100% confirmed...However, from what we know so far, Management is confident in its ability to compete directly in the synthetic market, AE has on multiple times at presentations outlined the Lithium iOn market as a target market, and to date costs of producing such product are significantly less than traditional synthetic graphite.

Obviously this is just a simple bit of high-level dot-connecting analysis, but if us on the outside are envisioning such things, one must be intrigued by what those inside ZEN offices (AE / Dr. Chahar / Mr. Yamashita) are envisioning with the potential of the resource they are sitting on.

Cheers, D