How Tesla Founders Are Rebuilding America's Critical Supply Chain

The United States faces a critical infrastructure crisis that few are talking about. While the nation obsesses over AI races and chip dominance, America is 50 years behind China in critical minerals supply—a gap that threatens everything from electric vehicles to national security. Yet two former Tesla executives are launching an ambitious mission to rewire America's industrial foundation from the ground up.

This isn't just another startup story. Turner Caldwell (CEO of Mariana Minerals) and Drew Baglino (founder of Heron Power) are building the physical backbone that will power America's AI-driven future. They're not just talking about re-industrialization; they're excavating mines, constructing refineries, and redesigning power systems that have remained virtually unchanged for a century.

Why America's Critical Minerals Crisis Threatens Your Future

The mineral supply crisis is more than an abstract economic problem—it directly impacts consumer costs, job availability, and national competitiveness. Here's what you need to understand:

The Gap Widens Every Year

America doesn't just lag 50 years behind China in critical minerals capacity; the country is actively losing ground. While China methodically builds integrated supply chains, the US remains fragmented and dependent on overseas processing, particularly from geopolitical rivals. This vulnerability affects everything you touch: your smartphone's components, your car's battery, and the grid powering your home.

The bottleneck isn't extraction alone. Mining represents only part of the supply chain. The real problem: processing capacity sits almost entirely overseas. A copper mine in Utah might extract the raw material, but refining that copper into usable form requires shipping it overseas and waiting months for it to return. This inefficiency cascades through the entire economy, inflating costs and creating delays that American manufacturers can't afford.

Why Speed Matters More Than You Think

Even after the US government approves a new mining or refining project, the timeline is brutal. Construction takes five years. Reaching operational capacity adds another three to five years. That's a decade of waiting in an industry where China is measured in months. The soft constraint isn't regulatory approval—it's the glacial speed of American industrial project execution.

Mariana Minerals is laser-focused on compressing this timeline. By treating minerals projects like software development—with clear milestones, agile workflows, and continuous optimization—the company believes it can accelerate the entire phase of project development. When construction starts, every month matters.

The Jobs Nobody Expects

This crisis creates an unexpected opportunity: massive job creation in high-paying technical fields. Caldwell and Baglino's initial projects will generate over 500 construction jobs within 18 months, with permanent technical positions following. These aren't assembly line jobs from your grandfather's era—they're specialized, skilled positions requiring training but offering salaries and career trajectories that can rival tech industry compensation.

The misconception that American labor costs make manufacturing uncompetitive is outdated. In modern factories, labor represents less than 5-10% of cost of goods sold. The real competitive advantage comes from co-located supply chains—where everything needed to manufacture a product exists within a few hours' drive. China has perfected this model. America is just beginning to attempt it.

The Tesla Playbook: How to Innovate on Archaic Systems

What makes Caldwell and Baglino's approach different from traditional industrial companies? They're importing Tesla's revolutionary philosophy into sectors that haven't seen meaningful innovation in generations.

Techno-Optimism Meets Hard Science

Tesla proved one critical principle: you can radically innovate on old, archaic systems if you believe hard enough. The automotive industry had been solved for 100 years before Tesla arrived. Yet Elon Musk's company approached vehicle manufacturing, battery production, and energy systems with the assumption that everything could be improved—not incrementally, but fundamentally.

Caldwell brought this mindset to minerals. The mining and refining industries operate with 19th-century mechanical systems. Limited automation. No real-time monitoring. Fragmented decision-making across dozens of humans with embedded knowledge that takes decades to build. The traditional minerals executive sees this as "the way things are done." Caldwell sees it as a technology problem waiting to be solved.

Heron Power applies the same principle to the electrical grid. While power electronics have improved exponentially over the past 40 years—mirroring Moore's Law for semiconductors—the grid itself remains unchanged. Solid-state transformers, silicon-based power conversion, and software-controlled systems could revolutionize electricity distribution. Yet few companies have tried because the grid feels too big, too regulated, too entrenched. Baglino doesn't see obstacles; he sees an enormous market awaiting disruption.

Speed as a Competitive Weapon

Tesla operates with an appetite for risk that traditional industrial companies find reckless. This enables fast decision-making. At traditional mining or power companies, bureaucracy calcifies decision loops. By the time leadership approves an initiative, market conditions have shifted. Tesla compressed this timeline through radical decentralization and empowerment.

When Baglino's team built the Megafactory in Lathrop, California, they took a shuttered JCPenney warehouse and transformed it into a battery manufacturing facility in 11 months. That timeline would horrify traditional industrial managers. Yet it's the standard Tesla expects. Caldwell and Baglino are building organizations where teams move with velocity, knowing that speed compounds advantages.

Commitment to Outcomes Over Comfort

Here's the Tesla principle that separates true builders from pretenders: if the outcome is worth fighting for, you fight through challenges rather than shelving difficult projects. Traditional industrial companies attempt innovation, face obstacles, and quietly archive the effort. Tesla barrels forward.

Autonomy in mining has been attempted dozens of times. Previous attempts failed, and companies isolated the work into small teams that never integrated into operations. Mariana Minerals is taking the opposite approach: embedding autonomy as a core operating principle across the entire company. The company is making a massive bet that reinforcement learning can remove humans from refinery control loops, enabling machines to continuously optimize complex chemical processes in real time.

This requires belief that most executives lack. The outcome—dramatically accelerated minerals production with far fewer humans—is worth fighting years of skepticism, failed experiments, and technical challenges. Tesla proved this principle works. Caldwell and Baglino are applying it to industries that haven't experienced this level of commitment since the American industrial golden age.

How Software Infiltrates Hardware: The Operating System Approach

Mariana Minerals' innovation strategy reveals a sophisticated understanding of how technology actually transforms industries. The company isn't a software vendor; it's a fully integrated minerals company where software amplifies every process.

Three Operating Systems for Industrial Reinvention

Caldwell described three core systems driving Mariana's approach: Capital Project OS handles everything from mine development through engineering, construction, and procurement—essentially treating minerals projects like complex software systems with clear stages, dependencies, and milestones. Instead of traditional project management tools, the system uses agentic workflow automation to compress timelines and catch inefficiencies invisible to human managers.

Plant OS represents the reinforcement learning bet. Refineries process highly variable feedstock—ore composition varies dramatically across mining sites. Humans must constantly tune temperatures, flow rates, chemical addition rates, and residence times. This requires embedded expertise that takes decades to develop. Mariana's system uses AI to learn optimal control patterns, then operates refineries autonomously. When feedstock composition changes, the AI adapts in real time. No human expert required.

Mine OS applies similar principles to mining operations. Mining sites make thousands of daily decisions about resource allocation, task sequencing, and equipment deployment. Poor decision-making cascades into low productivity, equipment breakdowns, and underutilized assets. Mine OS treats this as an optimization problem: given available materials, pending tasks, and onsite personnel, what sequence maximizes output while minimizing waste?

The Culture Problem Nobody Discusses

Here's where most technology implementations fail: software engineers build sophisticated systems, then hand them to operators still using pen-and-paper workflows and scattered spreadsheets. Adoption stalls. The technology sits unused. Traditional consulting approaches—deploying engineers as external experts—don't solve this because engineers lack skin in the game.

Mariana solves this through vertical integration and cultural alignment. Software engineers sit directly alongside operating teams, designing tools for the people who'll use them daily. More critically, everyone shares the same incentives. When operating teams resist change, software engineers don't get paid. When automation succeeds, everyone prospers. This alignment forces designers to understand the deep problems operators face, then build solutions that respect existing workflows while introducing automation incrementally.

This is the insight that separates Mariana from traditional software-in-industrial-settings approaches. You can't impose software culture on mining culture. You have to create a new culture where both thrive together.

The Supply Chain Revolution: Co-Location as Competitive Moat

Baglino identified the true competitive advantage that observers frequently miss: co-located supply chains demolish the logistics costs that make American manufacturing expensive.

Why China Dominates (And How to Compete)

China's industrial advantage isn't primarily labor cost—it's geographic concentration. Building a car requires 7,000 parts. In China's manufacturing zones, everything needed for that car exists within a three-hour drive. Suppliers cluster around manufacturers. Logistics time collapses to hours instead of weeks. This drastically reduces inventory carrying costs, accelerates problem-solving when supply issues emerge, and enables just-in-time manufacturing that buffers against disruptions.

America's fragmented supply chains stretch across continents. A factory in one state sources components from six others and overseas vendors. Logistics costs spike. Inventory sits idle. When problems emerge, solving them requires coordinating across competing jurisdictions with conflicting regulations.

The solution: intentional industrial zones where minerals companies, refineries, battery manufacturers, and power electronics firms co-locate. Imagine a region where Mariana Minerals operates mines and refineries, Heron Power manufactures transformers, battery companies build packs, and assemblers create finished products—all within 100 miles. Logistics costs plummet. Innovation accelerates because companies can collaborate in person. Workers move between firms, spreading expertise. New companies launch in the ecosystem because the infrastructure already exists.

This requires coordinated industrial policy, which America abandoned in favor of market-driven development. The cost: decades of lost competitiveness. Baglino is advocating for federal-state coordination to identify regions for energy and manufacturing buildout, then systematically removing barriers to development.

Local Alignment Changes Everything

Baglino's experience demonstrates how municipal support transforms project timelines. When local jurisdictions treat projects as opportunities and seek to approve compliant development, timelines compress. When jurisdictions find reasons to say "no" at every step, projects languish.

Building the Megafactory in 11 months wasn't magic. It required alignment. The local jurisdiction understood that the project created jobs, economic activity, and tax revenue. Leadership said "yes" to zoning variances, permits, and operational allowances—not because rules disappeared, but because decisions prioritized project success.

American re-industrialization hinges on this principle. Federal policy can provide incentives. State leaders can create industrial zones. But without local jurisdictions saying "yes, let's build this," projects fail. Caldwell and Baglino are essentially asking: what if every local government treated critical infrastructure projects with the alignment that enabled the Megafactory? The economic impact would be transformative.

Rebuilding an Industrial Workforce: Creativity Beats Tradition

Both founders emphasized an unexpected insight: American industrial talent exists; it's just not where traditional recruiters look.

Mining Needs Oil and Gas Expertise

Caldwell noted that the mining industry has experienced meaningful attrition over the past 35 years. The talent pool withered as younger workers chose tech, finance, or other sectors. Yet the oil and gas industry retained exceptional talent in reservoir optimization, equipment management, and operations scaling. Many of these skills transfer directly to mining.

Additionally, the software optimization algorithms underlying Mariana's systems resemble those used in consumer apps—dog walking apps, ride optimization, loan underwriting, ad targeting. Software engineers from consumer tech can learn domain-specific applications quickly once they understand mining fundamentals. The talent exists; it just requires creative recruiting and intentional skill bridging.

Power Electronics Needs Bottling and Syringe Manufacturing

Baglino faced a similar challenge building Tesla's battery facility. Power electronics manufacturing has limited precedent in America. Rather than searching for an imaginary pool of power electronics experts, he recruited from high-speed bottling plants and syringe manufacturing facilities. These industries require similar skills: precision assembly, high-speed production, quality control at scale, and troubleshooting complex systems.

Workers from these industries adapted quickly once they understood the fundamentals. The underlying principles—managing variations, optimizing throughput, preventing defects—are identical across industries. What matters is finding people with the relevant skill set, then providing technical training specific to their new domain.

Making Mining Sexy Again

Caldwell faces a reputation challenge. In popular culture, resource extraction villains populate every movie. Mining feels extractive, environmentally destructive, outdated. Yet mining that materials for solar panels, batteries, and grid infrastructure enables the clean energy transition. The industry must rebrand itself as the foundation of sustainability, not its enemy.

This requires storytelling. Mariana can attract talent by positioning mining differently: you're not extracting ore; you're enabling clean energy. You're not perpetuating fossil fuels; you're building the infrastructure for decarbonization. When framed this way, mining becomes compelling to younger workers seeking meaningful impact.

The Policy Asks: What Government Must Do

Both founders concluded with specific, actionable requests that illuminate what government support actually means for industrial re-industrialization.

Minerals Mandate with Oil and Gas Toolkit

Caldwell advocated for a minerals mandate equivalent to America's energy mandate—which has driven energy policy for decades. But more specifically: examine every policy tool applied to oil and gas development over 50 years, then apply equivalent tools to minerals.

This includes tax incentives, production credits, long-term purchase agreements, and financing mechanisms that mobilize private capital. Without government certainty that minerals will be purchased and valued long-term, private investors hesitate. They remember industries abandoned when policy shifted. A minerals mandate provides certainty: yes, America is committed to domestic minerals production. Therefore, building capacity is profitable long-term.

Durable Industrial Policy Creating Certainty

Baglino emphasized that suppliers and financiers resist commitment without policy certainty. A company building transformers needs confidence that customers will purchase them. Financiers need assurance that tax policies won't change mid-project. States need to know federal support is durable.

Rather than episodic subsidies that vanish with administrations, America needs sustained industrial policy: commitment that domestic manufacturing is a priority, backed by multi-year funding and regulatory stability. This enables private investors to plan, secure capital, and commit resources.

Federal-State Coordination on Energy and Manufacturing Zones

Baglino's proposal suggests coordinating federal resources with state governments to identify regions for intentional buildout: areas where energy generation (solar, wind, batteries), minerals processing, and manufacturing converge. By concentrating infrastructure investment, government can create the co-located supply chain ecosystems that enable competitiveness.

This requires states identifying candidate regions, federal government providing development capital, and local jurisdictions committing to permitting alignment. The result: strategic industrial zones that attract private investment and accelerate American re-industrialization.

Federal Highway Trust Fund for the Grid

Finally, Baglino proposed a federal highway trust fund equivalent for electrical grid infrastructure—a dedicated funding mechanism for grid modernization and expansion. America's patchwork electrical system evolved without master planning. A federal trust fund would enable coordinated grid expansion, connecting manufacturing zones, improving resilience, and reducing costs.

This is not a radical proposal. America built the interstate highway system through dedicated funding. The grid undergoes constant expansion and replacement anyway. Coordinating this investment would dramatically improve efficiency and support the energy-intensive industries essential for AI advancement and decarbonization.

The Bigger Picture: Atoms, Not Algorithms, Determine AI Dominance

The most important insight both founders emphasized: AI dominance and re-industrialization are fundamentally physical projects, not algorithmic ones.

The AI race narrative emphasizes models and chips—software breakthroughs and semiconductor competition. But every AI breakthrough requires enormous energy consumption. Every new factory, every autonomous system discussed needs materials underneath it. Mining operations. Refining capacity. Grid infrastructure. Power systems. These are atoms, not algorithms.

Without critical minerals, AI advancement stalls. Without power capacity, data centers can't operate. Without grid modernization, electricity can't flow where and when needed. The US can develop brilliant AI algorithms, but without the physical infrastructure supporting them, American AI leadership remains theoretical.

Conversely, if America solves critical minerals supply, builds modern power systems, and establishes domestic manufacturing capacity, the nation secures structural advantages that no algorithm can overcome. This is why Caldwell and Baglino's work matters more than most people realize.

Conclusion

Two Tesla veterans are undertaking one of the most important industrial projects in modern American history. They're not waiting for government permission or perfect market conditions. They're building—mines, refineries, power systems—while simultaneously advocating for policy changes that accelerate the transition.

Their message is clear: America can rebuild its industrial backbone. We've done it before through national projects that seemed impossible. We can do it again. But it requires techno-optimism, policy commitment, and unwavering focus on outcomes. The grid-scale opportunity awaits whoever executes fastest and most intelligently.

If you're interested in re-industrialization, critical minerals, or America's economic future, this conversation between two practical builders offers the clearest roadmap available. Their specific asks aren't just political positions—they're blueprints for how government and private enterprise can partner to rebuild American dynamism. The next chapter of American industrial success depends on whether we follow that blueprint.

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Original source: The Founders Who Left Tesla to Rebuild America | a16z

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