Elon Musk’s fortune may stretch into the trillions, but most of it relies on a South African town hardly visible on a map.
Hotazel, deep in the Northern Cape, has only about 4,000 residents. Yet this small town feeds one of the world’s biggest electric vehicle businesses. It produces a mineral that keeps Tesla’s wheels and batteries turning.
That contrast feels almost poetic. A place whose name reportedly grew from being “hot as hell” in one of the driest parts of South Africa. Meanwhile, the company it supports has a market value of about R25 trillion and dreams of autonomous cars, robots and artificial intelligence.
WHY DOES ELON NEED HOTAZEL?
Hotazel sits on the Kalahari Manganese Field, which contains an estimated 70% to 80% of the world’s known land-based manganese reserves. Few places can match that statistic.
Manganese rarely grabs headlines. Gold and diamonds steal the spotlight. Yet modern electric vehicles would struggle without it.
Tesla uses manganese in its nickel-manganese-cobalt batteries because it improves safety, durability and energy density. It also helps to reduce dependence on costly nickel and cobalt.
The metal also supports Tesla’s move towards lithium-manganese-iron-phosphate batteries for some vehicles.
Pretoria-born Musk – who also has SpaceX under his belt – has repeatedly described manganese as one of the materials needed to make electric cars more affordable as production expands.
Tesla does not buy directly from Hotazel’s mines. The journey is far longer than that.
South Africa exports more than 60% of its manganese to China, where it becomes steel and battery materials before entering global manufacturing chains.
Much of that processed material supports production at Tesla’s Shanghai Gigafactory. The latter produces more than half of all Tesla vehicles sold worldwide.
It is a remarkable journey from the Kalahari to one of the world’s busiest factories.
If the mines around Hotazel stopped operating, Tesla would need to source manganese elsewhere, perhaps from Australia or Gabon. That shift would probably increase costs and place extra pressure on battery engineers to redesign their material mix.
SMALL TOWN, BIG REPUTATION
Hotazel belongs to the Joe Morolong Local Municipality, which has only 2 312 registered taxpayers. Their average taxable income stands at about R400 705 a year, well above the Northern Cape average.
Mining engineers, metallurgists and heavy equipment specialists drive much of that figure.
It is easy to overlook Hotazel while racing across the map of South Africa. There are no giant skylines or celebrity landmarks.
Instead, there is just dust and heat.
And that one mineral that quietly helps power millions of electric vehicles.
Sometimes the biggest fortunes really do originate in the smallest places.
Mariana Balt
www.sapeople.com
