We’ve been getting teaser pitches for a “forever battery” for years now, ever since the earliest solid state battery companies began to come public (and even before, actually). One of the most frequently trumpeted ads for a “forever battery” came from Paul Mampilly at Banyan Hill in a very misleading pitch that primarily focused on a private company we can’t invest in (but threw in some recommendations on the side, while we wait for that company, Sila Nanotechnologies, to come public). He typically called that a “12 million mile battery” in those ads, which started about two years ago… but now Mampilly is leaving Banyan Hill, and the eyeball-catching “forever battery” idea remains enticing to investors, so we’re seeing a lot more questions about the “forever battery” spiel for a different Banyan Hill letter, Charles Mizrahi’s Alpha Investor.

This ad actually started running in August of last year, though it didn’t get a ton of traction at the time, and we did cover it about six months ago, though that coverage was buried in an article I wrote that touched on half a dozen different “forever battery” ideas that were circulating.

So let’s check in on that again, see if we can answer the latest round of questions from readers, and confirm that Mizrahi is still pitching the same story. And we can also dig into the second stock he’s pitching, which I haven’t covered in the past… the first “special report” Mizrahi is peddling is, “The Forever Battery: How to Profit as EV Sales Grow 1,500% Over the Next 4 Years”; and the second is “A New Era of Energy Storage: The Hottest Breakthrough of the 21st Century.”

The promise is, as always very compelling — and the copywriters manage to both drive a FOMO feeling and cover their butts by reminding us that betting your future on a single stock is dumb:

“As the Forever Battery triggers the mass adoption of electric vehicles, the stock in Charles’ report could help you find financial freedom.

“Remember, though, nothing in the world of tech innovation is a sure thing.

“So if you decide to invest, you shouldn’t go all-in on this one stock.

“But the upside is so massive … just a small stake of $1,000 could hand you a potential fortune within five years — if you get started today.”

But the tease is still the same as it was a year ago:

“All told, we’re looking at an estimated $5 TRILLION in new wealth being created.

“Even if you get a tiny piece of that, it could move you closer to the financial future you’ve dreamed of … or at the very least, give you enough money to enjoy life more.

“When The New York Times said “it has the potential to mint the next Steve Jobs,” THIS is what they were referring to.

“Simply put, the Forever Battery is more than just a revolution … it’s an unstoppable force…

“And one company is at the heart of it all.

“Renowned scientist Paul Albertus says the company has hit a ‘home run in terms of their solid-state battery performance data.’

“A senior analyst at Investor Place, Luke Lango, calls it ‘a revolutionary company in its own right’ … and says that right now is ‘a golden buying opportunity’ for investors.

“Inside Charles’ report, you’ll learn the details of the world-changing Forever Battery…

“You’ll also learn the ticker symbol … and how much his research indicates the stock could go up.

“As the Forever Battery fuels a 1,500% surge in EV sales, the potential for massive gains skyrockets.”

Well, if it was a “golden buying opportunity” a year ago, I guess it’s still golden at half the price now… that tease points at solid state battery pioneer QuantumScape (QS), which was around $22 at the time this ad was first running. That seemed like a “discount” at the time to a lot of people, since Quantumscape was one of the wildest “mania” stocks of late 2020 and early 2021 after it came public through a SPAC merger, soaring briefly to a valuation of almost $50 billion and a $100+ share price, despite the fact that it was (and is) still really a lab doing R&D work, with several years yet to go before they can hope to have a commercial product.

Today, we’re back to something closer to the valuation that was imagined when they first talked up their SPAC merger in 2020, they have a market cap of under $5 billion, the shares are at about $11, and perhaps we can look at the stock a little more rationally today. They’re still several years away from having a commercial product, analysts think a little bit of revenue will trickle through on their milestone payments and initial test products over the next year or two, but they’re going to be burning cash, probably at a pretty similar rate to today (roughly $300 million a year) until at least 2025. They’ve sold a ton of stock since going public, so they have the money, and they have the industrial partnerships, but what they don’t have is a guarantee. We can’t know if their technological advancements will continue, or if they will hit their goals in terms of commercializing their solid state battery technology — they might, and plenty of people say they are the leading lab in this space, and have the most potential, but the steps forward in technology are not necessarily predictable.

There’s a good Electrek article about Quantumscape’s progress here — they’ve added a couple new (unnamed) automotive partners, building on their longtime relationship with Volkswagen, so they now have six OEM partners in total. They’ve also continue to iterate their technology, which is a lithium metal solid state battery with a ceramic layer, and report that they have put their first 24-layer cell through initial testing, so they should be able to provide those cells to their automotive partners for Sample A testing. The indication so far is that moving from Sample A to B (larger scale) testing and then to a Sample C product, which would really be a prototype and ready for real-world testing and perhaps commercial-scale development, is probably going to take at least three years (18 months to go from A to B, then another 18 months to get to C). Right now they’re about to start Sample A deliveries, hopefully by the end of the year, so probably the most optimistic scenario is a prototype ready to be tested on the road at the end of 2025, and that assumes no big delays along the way.

Everything from the company still sounds optimistic and positive about their ability to push EVs forward with their faster-charging, safer solid state batteries, and when it comes to solid state automotive batteries I don’t know of anyone who is meaningfully far ahead of Quantumscape when it comes to a timeline for commercial production… but it’s still a story of going from the lab to the factory, and that’s a complex and time-consuming process. I wouldn’t talk you out of investing in Quantumscape at this point, at $5 billion and with a strong head of steam and good partnerships it may be a reasonable bet on the future of EV batteries… but don’t put your money down if you’re not willing to wait a few years, and perhaps suffer through some delays and disappointment along the way. Science doesn’t often move in a straight line.

And what’s the other stock teased by Mizrahi? It’s also a solid state battery story, to a degree, though it’s pitched as an energy storage company…

Here are the clues:

“Without efficient energy storage, fossil fuels are needed for times when the sun doesn’t shine, or the wind doesn’t blow.

“But now … utilities are building wind and solar farms that, together with new battery storage solutions, are far more cost-effective than building new fossil fuel plants.

“Jigar Shah, the founder of the pioneering solar company SunEdison believes hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of fossil-fueled power plants might soon be mothballed for good.

“That’s why a Forbes contributor calls energy storage ‘the most important technology in the world right now.'”

And then he gets a little bit specific about the company:

“Some companies have tried to store renewable energy in lithium-ion batteries … with very limited success.

“Simply put, solid-state batteries are expected to be the only viable choice.

“And Charles Mizrahi believes one company holds the key to unlocking this historic energy revolution.

“In fact, it’s the ONLY company to provide 1.2 BILLION people access to renewable energy stored in solid-state batteries.

“And it’s just getting started…

“Its storage solutions provide energy access to off-grid sites through a “mini grid” powered by wind and solar.

“Its parent company is one of the 500 largest companies in the world — run by a man who Barron’s calls a combination of U.S. investors Warren Buffett and Carl Icahn.

“Yet you almost certainly haven’t heard of the company.”

So… hoodat? Thinkolator sez this one is Blue Solutions, which was spun out as a publicly traded company to raise awareness and cash for its solid state battery development, but then was taken private again after the price failed to take off — Vincent Bolloré’s Bolloré Group (BOL in Paris, BOIVF OTC in the US) is again the full owner of Blue Solutions (and yes, Barron’s did call him a cross between Warren Buffett and Carl Icahn… though that was in 2016. Here’s the total return since then of Bolloré (in purple), Berkshire Hathaway (blue) and Icahn Enterprises (green), just FYI — they’ve all trailed the S&P 500, and Bolloré has been the worst of them:

Batteries and EVs are not Bolloré’s main business, but they do highlight that area as one of their three main focal points — their larger businesses are transportation/logistics (including oil logistics), and communications (mostly through large ownership stakes in Vivendi and Universal Music Group). Electricity storage and electrical systems make up about 2% of their revenue right now, and do not get much of the “investor relations” attention, though they are certainly part of the “future” story that Bolloré would like to build.

Bolloré Blue Solutions does have solid state batteries, though they’re not the rapid-charge batteries that we’d all like to see developed, and they are used in both buses and energy storage at the moment. They have made commercial progress, though, like many battery players, they seem to see their current technology as somewhat of a stopgap until they are able to commercialize much better designs over the next five or ten years.

And there are surely challenges, Paris suspended its use of Bolloré “Blue Buses” after a couple of them caught fire, so that indicates we’re not dealing with the pinnacle of solid state achievement, something in those lithium salt layers is still awfully flammable even if it’s not a liquid. Maybe they’ll be able to develop a high-volume solid state battery over the next few years that makes a meaningful difference either in energy storage or in transportation, and they are certainly further along than Quantumscape because they used a different solid state technology and commercialized it much earlier, but they have not yet found the holy grail in that business yet. The good news, I suppose, is that it is a massive and profitable company, thanks to their oil facilities and their global transportation logistics platforms, let alone their large stake in dominant media companies Vivendi and UMG, so they don’t have to make money from batteries for a long time… which means the downside risk at Bolloré is much, much less than the downside risk at Quantumscape.

It’s also very likely true that Bolloré shares are trading at a discount to the real value of the logistics and communications companies they own (they trade at only about 60% of book value), so that also provides some more confidence to investors considering the stock… though it’s only fair to mention that most of the big European conglomerates trade at pretty meaningful discounts to the “sum of the parts” value of their investments, most of the time.

So there you have it — not a new idea, this teaser started running a year ago, but it’s still being circulated heavily as Banyan Hill tries to figure out how to promote “emerging technology” ideas without tech growth cheerleader Paul Mampilly. We don’t know what Mizrahi thinks about these investments today, since they’re still careful to date the presentation “August 2021” as they sell these special reports, but we should probably be a little cautious — it wouldn’t be unheard of for a newsletter to keep pitching ideas in its ads even after the editor had sold those stocks (heck, they’re still using the name and image of Paul Mampilly to promote some of Paul’s many newsletters on their website, even though he has publicly broken with the publisher and started his own business, and those letters are going to disappear or be taken over by new pundits once Mampilly’s contract officially runs out, which presumably must be August 31 — the number one priority for any publisher remains selling, no surprise). Both of these investments arguably look better than they did a year ago, though that’s little consolation to investors who’ve been waiting for solid state batteries to finally take over the world — patience is hard, particularly when you’ve been promised a daydream.

That’s what I think, anyway, but I’ll remind you that it’s your money we’re dealing with — so what you think is what really matters. Ready to bet on 2025 or 2030 with Quantumscape? Or invest in a little battery company that’s hiding behind Vivendi and a big transportation and logistics company in Bolloré? Let us know with a comment below. Thanks for reading!

Disclosure: Of the companies mentioned above, I own shares of Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, and, indirectly, of Universal Music Group through a Pershing Square investment (I mention that only because it’s the largest holding in the Pershing Square fund). I will not trade in any covered company for at least three days after publication, per Stock Gumshoe’s trading rules.