George Gilder is hyping some type of new materialI watched part of the spiel but gave up when he made the claim that you could land a plane using the substance and it would become invisible. It’s also stronger than Kevlar.
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Just another tease about the revolutionary potential of graphene, which gets pitched as a miracle every now and then — usually folks who pitch graphene end up hinting at a specific graphite mine that happens to have high quality large flake graphite, one of the potential materials you can use to create graphene, but Gilder’s hints all point to Universal Matter, which is a private company… so he’s probably just teasing this as a “you should buy it when it goes public” idea, I would guess, though he’s not specific enough in the ad to be sure.
From my perspective, graphene is cool but there aren’t any pure-play graphene companies that are really “investable” — the one that is public and has been teased the most over the past year is probably Graphene Manufacturing Group in Australia (GMG.AX, GMGMF), which still appears to be far from ready for prime time.
I know you and I are aware, and may have been keeping an eye on, Sila Nano. Have you heard anything about the infamous Tesla Employee #7 and his plans for Sila?
They signed a deal with Panasonic in December to supply anode material, though nobody knows how much, and they’re building the their factory and training people… they think they’ll be producing by sometime next year, though getting to scale might take five years.
No idea if they need capital or intend to IPO — they didn’t take the easy money when SPACs were raging, which in retrospect was probably wise, but I don’t know what their financial roadmap looks like now.
Gilder made an incredible call on Qualcomm back in the 1990s. I really think he’s doing it again with Universal Matter. One of the co-founders, James Tour, is arguably the greatest living chemist. In 2103, “Research and Development”, a scientific publication chose him as “scientist of the year” —for the planet! Tour holds over 200 patents, has had over 700 research accepted for publication in the peer-reviewed journals, and has been cited more than 140,000 times by other scientists in their published research papers. He’s done things that are absolutely mind-blowing. Universal Matter was founded on a discovery by one of Tour’s PhD candidates, Duy Luong, who is now the chief science officer at Universal Matter. Graphene is incredible stuff that could replace copper and steel in most applications, but it currently costs about $100,000. per ton to produce. Dr. Luong’s method enables production for possibly as little as $100. per ton. His process can convert the carbon in any organic material into graphene. That includes plastic waste, plastic recycling, etc.
Could be, I guess we’ll find out in the fullness of time… though it’s not really an investment recommendation when nobody can invest in the company (it’s still private).
If it is Universal Matter and if it is private then would it be some venture fund that owns some of it
George Gilders copies your claim, using garbage to create multiple-use graphene oxide. Ontario based company.
I could believe Gilder has a venture fund, ie. for us as an investment vehicle for Universal Matter. He posts like he has something this time. Anyone game on?
Much more likely it’s a bait and switch, “buy Universal Matter when/if it goes public, and in the meantime buy this other graphene-related penny stock” … but perhaps that’s just my skepticism showing through.