Musk Implied Tesla Had No Vested Interest in Bolivia's Lithium, "We Get Our Lithium From Australia" -LIE- Tesla Bought Batteries from ACISA, Whom Morales Reneged on Contracts Just Days Before Coup
In the aftermath of Musk appointing WEF puppet shill Linda Yaccarino as Twitter / X CEO, many who are feeling betrayed and disenfranchised (as others are emanating "I told you so's) are reflecting on red flags such as his alignment with transhumanism via Neuralink, or his contracts with the military via Space X.
But I want to revisit Bolivia, which has been effectively memory-holed.
In 2019, following the military coup in Bolivia, I wrote an article titled, "Bolivia: Coup or Revolt? A Battle of Narratives", published by the Antimedia on November 13th.
After pointing out the double standard in western media in their semantics in labeling coups versus revolts(or protests versus riots), my article goes on to then explain the emerging importance and relevance of the Bolivia in terms of having the world's largest Lithium reserves, in the context of a world that is transitioning away from fossil fuels and towards a battery-based future which currently is dependent on lithium-based batteries, and thus, access to lithium.
Drawing from the article that Common Dreams had published on the matter, I pointed to the German company ACI Systems Alemania GmbH (ACISA), and the fact that Morales had canceled important lithium contracts days with them prior to the coup that overthrew him, as being potentially relevant to the coup, if not being the reason for it.
I quoted Common Dreams in saying that Tesla bought batteries from ACISA, implying that Musk, Tesla and other companies(and those invested in them) that would benefit downstream from the ACISA deal had something to gain by a coup, by consequence of being clients of ACISA.
Common Dreams published the article titled, "Bolivian Coup Comes Less Than a Week After Morales Stopped Multinational Firm's Lithium Deal" ,
"The Sunday military coup in Bolivia has put in place a government which appears likely to reverse a decision by just-resigned President Evo Morales to cancel an agreement with a German company for developing lithium deposits in the Latin American country for batteries like those in electric cars.
'Bolivia's lithium belongs to the Bolivian people,' tweeted Washington Monthly contributor David Atkins. 'Not to multinational corporate cabals.'".... Going on to say that
"The Morales move on Nov. 4 to cancel the December 2018 agreement with Germany's ACI Systems Alemania (ACISA) came after weeks of protests from residents of the Potosí area. The region has 50% to 70% of the world's lithium reserves in the Salar de Uyuni salt flats.
Among other clients, ACISA provides batteries to Tesla; Tesla's stock rose Monday after the weekend. "
As Bloomberg News noted in 2018, that has set the country up to be incredibly important in the next decade:
Demand for lithium is expected to more than double by 2025. The soft, light mineral is mined mainly in Australia, Chile, and Argentina. Bolivia has plenty---9 million tons that have never been mined commercially, the second-largest amount in the world---but until now there's been no practical way to mine and sell it.
Morales' cancellation of the ACISA deal opened the door to either a renegotiation of the agreement with terms delivering more of the profits to the area's population or the outright nationalization of the Bolivian lithium extraction industry.
As Telesur reported in June, the Morales government announced at the time it was 'determined to industrialize Bolivia and has invested huge amounts to ensure that lithium is processed within the country to export it only in value-added form, such as in batteries.'"
Elon Musk later denied ties between Tesla and special interests seeking access to Bolivia's lithium reserves, as if Tesla had nothing to gain from Bolivia's lithium reserves opening up to ACISA, which is factually, a blatant lie - being that Tesla bought lithium batteries from ACISA(and even if he didn't the increase in supply available to the market could be seen to bring prices down for everyone).\
By 2020, the conspiracy theory I had helped originally propagate was gaining traction and often popping up in the replies of Musks' tweets, leading to Musk making the tweets above, and then subsequent articles like this one below, published 2 days after Musks' tweets.
Published by Electrek, a (Tesla-friendly) news site dedicated to the EV industry, in July of 2020 titled: "Tesla and Elon Musk Accused of Orchestrating Bolivia Coup Over Lithium in New Crazy Conspiracy Theory" 
Insane theory? Lets find out how they debunked it.
Wait....what? Elecktrek claims that "Tesla has no relationship with ACI(ACISA)......other than the fact that Tesla uses Lithium, there's really no link between Musk,[and] the automaker"?
They would go on to cite Elon Musk's claim that Tesla sources its Lithium from Australia which followed the infamous "We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it." statement, which many took as an ironic, gaslighting admission that that he was involved in the coup, rather than ludicrous mockery.
So which is it? Does Tesla buy lithium batteries from ACISA and have a ventured interested in their supply chain, or are they not connected with ACISA other than by association, and infact do source all their lithium from Australia without any intention of optimizing their Lithium supply availability?...Who is lying?
Does Tesla source lithium batteries from ACISA or not?!?!
In 2018, following Bolivia having initially struck the deal with ACISA, EE News Europe published the article, "German Venture Taps Bolivian Lithium Deposits"
The introductory paragraph reads:
"With the planned establishment of a public-private joint venture between the Bolivian state enterprise Yacimientos de Litio Bolivianos (YLB) and the German ACI Systems Alemania GmbH (ACISA), Germany is to gain access to the raw material. ACISA's customers include Siemens, Continental, BMW, IBM, Tesla, First Solar, Bosch and the Fraunhofer research company. "
RT reported on the matter, dedicating an entire article to it, "'We will coup whoever we want': Elon Musk Sparks Online Riot With Quip About Overthrow of Bolivia's Evo Morales" - concluding with the sentence that "Although it's true that Tesla receives lithium from Australia, it is also said to be one of ACISA's clients."
In other words, Elon Musk was being disingenuous, implying that Tesla had no direct ties to the situation, and they had nothing to gain from ACISA's deal with the Bolivian government that was axed just prior to the coup.
After coming across this, in the midst of the Bolivia story developing and breaking, I found it highly likely that the lithium issue was underpinning Bolivia's coup, and highly improbable that the important lithium deal being axed days before the coup was a mere coincidence of timing. If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck...
In my 2019 article, I wrote:
According to a WikiLeaks cable from 2009 following an article by Foreign Policy titled "Bolivia's Lithium Powered Future" -- "Nationalist sentiment over the lithium reserves is growing, and state mining company COMIBOL has been unwilling to begin working with international investors until the small COMIBOL pilot plant has shown the best processes for lithium extraction. Government officials have stated that they look to international investors for "technical support" but not as full partners. According to Saul Villegas, head of state mining company COMIBOL's lithium division: "The previous imperialist model of exploitation of our natural resources will never be repeated in Bolivia. Maybe there could be the possibility of foreigners accepted as minority partners or, better yet, as our clients."
In February, Reuters reported, "Bolivia has chosen a Chinese consortium to be its strategic partner on new $2.3 billion lithium projects, the government said on Wednesday, giving China a potential foothold in the country's huge untapped reserves of the prized electric battery metal.".
Following that deal, a deal was reached with ACISA, but what canceled by Morales a week prior to the coup as a result of protests by locals. Days after, days before the coup,[ ACISA would publicly call on the German government to get involved.
](https://web.archive.org/web/20191115192837/https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/german-lithium-importer-calls-government-help-row-bolivia)Spiegel online would report that, " 'We won't just give up on this project," ACISA head Wolfgang Schmutz told the news website Spiegel Online, adding that policymakers like economy and energy minister Peter Altmaier now need to find a solution. Schmutz said his company still had not received any formal note on the annulment of the contract with the state-owned Bolivian YLB group that Bolivia's President Evo Morales announced on 3 November, adding that "I thought I must be mistaken" when he first heard of the decision on the radio. Schmutz said 'legally binding' contracts had been made with YLB but added that his company had no interest in fighting the case out in court. 'I hope the politicians that backed us in the past won't just disappear now,' Schmutz said, stressing that a secure lithium supply is 'the basis' for Germany's energy transition and e-mobility plans.' ""\
I realized that while the ACISA executive was stressing the importance for lithium acquisition for Germany publicly, there were no doubt many more behind the scenes, both in the private sector and in government, that echoed the sentiment with worry as they watched Bolivia scrap the ACISA deal. From my understanding of history and geopolitics, superpowers and state actors are going to naturally be motivated to want to intervene in and control the affairs of a small government controlling an important, large reserve of a scarce resource that other much larger powers demand access to.
The Clean Energy Wire pointed out the importance of this deal when covering Morales' decision to scrap the deal with ACISA:
"Germany's carmakers and the government both have announced plans to boost the number of e-cars in the country over the next decade, aiming to have up to 10 million e-cars on the road by 2030. Moreover, economy minister Altmaier has repeatedly urged that Europe needs to become less reliant on Asian battery manufacturers and must build up its own battery production. Lithium is a key resource for the currently dominant lithium-ion battery technology."
So the question is, after being silent on the Bolivia coup for months, why did Musk finally engage on the the topic by gaslighting everyone and then lie by omission about Tesla's proximity to the debacle?
Why did Elon Musk get away with distancing himself from the matter, with a dismissive "Also, we get out lithium from Australia"...? This was ignoring and trying to seemingly deflect from the reality that Tesla was buying Lithium batteries from ACISA, the company which had managed to acquire the Lithium contracts only for the contracts to be reneged on by Morales.
The screenshot above, is essentially Musk gaslighting and blatantly lying. A lie by omission is still a lie --- and sometimes they are the most devastating ones.
Tucker Carlson recently made a public statement on twitter after being fired from Fox News, in which he explained how lies by omission are the main way the media deceives the public:\
You often hear people say the news is full of lies. But most of the time that's not exactly right. Much of what you see on television or read in the New York Times is in fact true in the literal sense. It could pass one of the media's own 'fact checks.' Lawyers would be willing to sign off on it, in fact they may have. But that doesn't make it true. It's not true. At the most basic level the news you consume is a lie. A lie of the stealthiest and most insidious kind.
Facts have been withheld on purpose along with proportion and perspective. You are being manipulated."
"If I tell you a man has been unjustly arrested for armed robbery, that is not strictly speaking a lie, he may have been framed at this point... but if I don't mention the fact that the same man has been arrested for the same crimes six times before, am I really informing you?
"No, I'm not. I'm misleading you."
It would be one thing if Musk just made the coup statement stand alone, it'd be easier to take it as a joke meant to earnestly mock the idea that he was connected. But to make the statement "We will coup whoever we want!" and then subsequently state "Also, we get our lithium from Australia" was to blatantly deflect from the circumstances that implicate him and his companies interests in a coup, or their proximity to the lithium supply chain...
And like the Tucker quote above, because Tesla does get a lot of their lithium from Australia, of course if Elon was pressed on this lie in a literal or legal sense, it isn't a direct, literal 100% lie. But it certainly isn't the truth. Notice how Musk did not say "we get all of our lithium from Australia". Obviously, he would have been lying if he said that. And if Tesla and ACISA did get all of their lithium from Australia(which they do not), that would not even mean necessarily that they were uninterested in diversifying their supply chain, or would stand nothing to benefit. How would that eliminate any motive to find cheaper supply sources? Given that the world is is transitioning to a battery-driven "green" future, and battery tech relies on lithium and will for the foreseeable future, and the lithium triangle contains such a gargantuan portion of the world's lithium reserves...it shouldn't be hard to connect the dots on why opening up access to additional lithium reserves would be in the interest of governments and corporations such as Tesla.
I digress, Elon Musk's deflection from Tesla's ties to ACISA with his ambiguous statement about sourcing lithium from Australia was a lie by omission, meant to deceive the public, and maybe even to gaslight the minority paying attention. The circumstances surrounding the coup, the importance of the Lithium triangle in the future of energy, and the importance of energy in markets and global affairs, should be enough to warrant due suspicion of external forces acting on the coup.
As TeleSUREnlish reported, In March of 2021, "The Bolivian President Luis Arce announced publicly that Bolivia had restarted negotiations aimed at the industrialization of its lithium reserves with Germany and opened the doors to other countries willing to participate in the project. Bolivia holds one of the largest lithium deposits of Latin America's Lithium Triangle[contains 2/3rd's of world's proven lithium reserves]. The U.S. Geological Survey's latest lithium report indicates that Bolivia's Salar de Uyuni salt flat alone contains 21 million metric tonnes of silvery-white alkali metal."
The TeleSUREnlish article, titled, "Luis Arce: The Realization of Evo's Lithium Dream for Bolivia", would go on to contextualize how Morales didn't want Bolivia to fall victim to the resource curse, he did not wanted Lithium to to just be exported raw, but for intermediate goods to be produced with it farther along the supply chain, within the country.
"[Morales] did not want Bolivia to become simply an exporter of raw materials but planned to create an entire industrial chain including battery plants and car factories in Bolivia. However, mining the metal in Bolivia presents numerous challenges. First, lithium brine found in Uyuni has high levels of magnesium, thus requiring additional efforts to separate the two. Second, Uyuni's higher rainfall and cooler climate decrease the rate of brine evaporation and make lithium extraction more problematic. Third, the lack of infrastructure creates further obstacles.
It is worth noting: A common critique of the US and IMF led world order is that countries rich in natural resources were discouraged from industrialization by neoliberalism, and discrepancies between nation-state economies and currencies encouraged countries with strong currencies to deindustrialize - developed nations like Venezuela deindustrialized gradually over decades due to extravagant windfalls of oil revenue that lowered the domestic cost of imports and crowded out domestic goods and services slowly chipping away at domestic production infrastructure. But IMF austerity measures accelerated this phenomenon.
The US is undergoing the same phenomenon seen in countries afflicted by the "resource curse", and has been for some time, only instead of oil being responsible for the resource curse(although, the US isn't far off from being a petrostate when you look at our exports, and the US Dollar's reserve currency status is essentially due to the petrodollar having been established...), it is the reserve currency status of the US dollar that has allowed for excessive importation, wasteful spending, and gradual deindustrialization.
The TeleSUREnlish article would continue
"Proposals from fifteen companies from several countries were submitted for the industrialization of the evaporite complex to form a joint venture with the Bolivian company YLB (Yacimientos de Litios Bolivianos)", the former vice-minister notes. "This venture had the state company as its majority partner." The German company ACI Systems was awarded the contract. In addition to that, ACI Systems Alemania GMbH offered a new technology aimed at speeding up the extraction process by producing lithium hydroxide directly from brine.
A similar tendering process was carried out for the Salar de Coipasa in Oruro and Pastos Grandes in Potosí, with Chinese company TBEA getting the deal, Echazu recollects.
Both ACI Systems and YLB were expected to establish a plant capable of producing 35,000 to 40,000 yearly tons of lithium hydroxide by late 2022. But joint venture terms, including royalties for local communities, were abruptly opposed by the Potosí Civic Committee (COMCIPO). Faced with local pressure, Evo Morales was forced to suspend collaboration with the German firm.
"I believe that the Civic Committee has distorted the policy of the Bolivian government," says Echazu. "In reality, their movement was part of the coup d'état and therefore prevented the development of the industrialization of lithium and other components of brine. This committee has advisers who have worked with the Chilean government and others with a frank neoliberal position, opposed to the development of sovereign policies... For this reason, they were part of the coup government of Jeanine Añez, whose objective was to hand over the salt flats and their exploitation to transnational companies, as stated by her ministers."
We know the US expressed support for the coup, blatantly. Everyone knows the OAS, funded by the CIA, helped orchestrate it and their "flawed" electoral audit was the main premise behind the organized demonstrations by the opposition that led to the coup.
The Guardian pointed out in the article "Silence reigns on the US-backed coup against Evo Morales in Bolivia", that the "New York Times reported on 7 June, the organisation's "flawed" analysis immediately following the 20 October election fueled "a chain of events that changed the South American nation's history'
The Hill allowed Two U.S. House representatives to publish an op-ed in 2020 titled, "Congress Should Investigate OAS Actions in Bolivia", in which the representatives wrote:
Recently, the New York Times reported on a new academic study which concluded that the OAS' initial claims of fraud "relied on incorrect data and inappropriate statistical techniques." Researchers from the Center for Economic and Policy Research and the MIT Election Data and Science Lab had already reached broadly similar conclusions over the last six months.
The Times report noted that these "flawed" OAS claims had "fueled a chain of events that changed the South American nation's history" and helped "push Mr. Morales from power with military support weeks later."
The new academic study concurs with the vast majority of experts who have looked at the data, including 133 economists and statisticians who sent a letter to the OAS, similarly challenging their allegations of fraud, on Dec. 2, 2019. The letter has gone unanswered.
The coup did not last long, and after multiple suspended elections, in late 2020 the people were finally allowed to re-elect Morale's party into power after it had been violently overthrown in the middle of the night by military actors the year before - Lading to headlines such as Glenn Greenwald's, "Bolivians Return Evo Morales's Party to Power One Year After a U.S.-Applauded Coup"
While the coup failed, there are still many things unanswered about it, including the role of foreign nations and actors. And some of those questions should be directed at Musk who seemed to very much want to ignore the whole controversy, and then when that didn't work, mock it and brush it all under the rug and claim distance between his company and the special interest entanglement...when in fact, to reemphasize, his company, Tesla, was a direct purchaser of batteries from ACISA, the company that Morales reneged contracts with days prior to being overthrown in the coup.
Why do people trust this man?
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