d, and they have a shouting match. To me that's not bad news at all. That's sort of like just what you'd want. You'd want people really caring, really smart, and if they disagree they're not going to give up. They just go at each other.

So I wouldn't be surprised you're going to see Elon Musk phasing out of his government DOGE work. I think some of that is because it was going to happen anyway in May. I think his time was up. But I think that also it wasn't working because the government sort of maybe is open to anything new like a DOGE person coming in and shaking things up, but in fairly quick order they're going to want to have their own control. So I think Elon Musk was probably a little too dangerous to have running around for too long in the government. So I think he did an amazing job and may have created a structure that can continue making things more efficient and saving money, but it should be said that it never got close to the trillion dollars. And I think that's one of the things that Scott Bessent was criticizing him for. And then Musk was allegedly criticizing Bessent for being some kind of a Soros related person because I guess he worked with Soros at one point. So that's pretty exciting.

But yeah, I would expect that Elon Musk will phase his time back to Tesla. And Tesla's at a really exciting time. It's weird that their sales are down because of the political connection, but at the same time their products have never been this exciting. I mean they're right on the edge of full auto taxi, robots, use your car for an Uber. This is just the best stuff we've ever seen in technology. This is like the birth of the smartphone, the birth of the computer. So Tesla is really well set for I don't know just maybe decades of dominance in a few different areas. So it does make sense that Musk would turn his attentions back to work as we all knew he would eventually. And I hope that the political stuff doesn't create too much of a drag on a great company.

According to China, the China Commerce Ministry says there have been no economic and trade negotiations between China and the US. So if you thought to yourself, well maybe Trump hasn't talked to Chairman Xi but surely there are discussions going on at lower levels. Nope. Apparently there are not discussions going on at lower levels according to China. But let's take a look at the implications of that. According to an article in Wired, even though China is limiting US access to critical minerals, it might not be as bad as you assume because we've all been told they need these critical rare earth materials to build all kinds of technology from your phones to your robots to your electric cars and everything else. And that's true, but we're being reminded by this article that you could live without them.

So for example your electric car could certainly operate without some of the rare earth materials. It might not last as long and there might be a feature or two that it can't do, but it'd still be an electric car. And apparently there are a number of examples of that where if you had to you could just sort of make your product without some of those rare earth minerals. It's just that it wouldn't be as good, but you could still make it and it would still be commercial and people would still buy it.

And then also this is what I was wondering about but apparently Belgium has emerged as a possible reexport hub meaning that if people bought the rare earth minerals from China, China doesn't know where it goes after that and that maybe some part of the European Union could be buying these rare earth materials. They'd have a closer connection to the United States than to China. And then the next thing you know the United States has some rare earth minerals from China but China doesn't know that we have it.

Now if all the countries that we sanction can pull this off, such as Iran, they still manage to get stuff. And I'm sure Russia still manages to get stuff. I feel like we can do the same thing. You don't think we could figure a way to smuggle in that rare stuff. The other thing I learned that I didn't know is that even though it's critical materials, we don't spend a lot. It's not like trillions of dollars or anything. It's like a fairly small amount of material, very important, but small in terms of quantity, but also small in terms of dollar amount. So one of the reasons that we don't have new mines and refineries popping up for these rare earth minerals is that all it would take, according to this article in Wired, all it would take is one new factory or refinery for one of those minerals and it would create too much of the mineral. So apparently the demand is critical because they're important, but it's a small demand. Like it's not that many dollars and it's not that many pounds of material. So if you built a new refinery it would maybe crush the price for the one mineral and your business model wouldn't work. So that's interesting. I didn't know any of that. But anyway, there might be workarounds for the rare earth minerals. We'll see.

According to Ryan Peterson who follows shipping, I think he's CEO of Flexport or founder or both, but Flexport's in the shipping industry, and he says that in the three weeks since the tariffs took effect the ocean container bookings from China to the US are down 60% industrywide and he predicts we'll have mass shortages this summer as goods don't show up and even if things got fixed now it's going to take till summer to get the mass shortages. I don't know shortages of what specifically but it's going to be a lot. A lot of companies sort of ordered extra in anticipation of shortages later. So once we work through the extra that people ordered, we're going to just run dry for some things. And again I don't know which ones, but and then if we decided to suddenly ramp up, you know let's say the tariff s