The elements of power, p.15
The Elements of Power, page 15
Compensation or not, Gertler was still left hanging. He lobbied the government. “Dan would come and he would leave without getting anything,” Katumba wrote. “He was neither reimbursed for his expenses, nor did he obtain new contracts. During all this period of bitterness, he hated me, blaming me for all the blockages he suffered.”
After a couple of months, Kabila Jr. found another use for Gertler: He asked the businessman to connect him with powerful people. Gertler, by all accounts, threw himself into the task. He set up meetings with the U.S. government, and he also arranged for Katumba to meet officials from the China Development Bank, a state-owned bank that had begun to give overseas loans to developing nations. It wasn’t always easy for Katumba to manage his president. When the chairman of the bank visited Kinshasa a few years later, Kabila Jr. was too busy to meet him. “The Chinese official had a bitter taste in his mouth after his trip,” Katumba remembered. “I had to apply myself to dissipate any ill will.”
Gertler, who had become more outwardly religious, also pushed Kabila Jr. to negotiate the end of the war. He became a representative of the Congolese president, traveling abroad to carry out diplomacy. Foreign officials would get a shock when meeting with Congolese delegations. They would expect a group of African diplomats and instead Gertler would appear, in the traditional garb of a Hasidic Jew, sometimes with a rabbi in tow.
In April 2002, Gertler arrived in Washington, D.C., bearing a letter signed by the Congolese president and addressed to President George W. Bush. It described Gertler as “a respected and well known international businessman” and an “old and trusted friend.” Kabila Jr. explained that although “the Democratic Republic of Congo is rich in many natural ressources [sic],” it now faced “occupying nations that are exploiting these ressources.” He was pleading with the U.S. administration to rid Congo of its occupiers—Rwanda and Uganda. “Mr. Gertler has conviced [sic] me to put trust in you and join the forces of good, rather than succumb to help offered by other nations, whom we doubt are on the good side,” he wrote.
The letter was the prelude to a series of meetings where Gertler told U.S. officials that “President Kabila believes that the rebel movements and foreign armies are using the cloak of war to disguise what has become a blatant exercise in self-enrichment through the illegal plunder of scarce resources.” He warned that Kabila Jr. could “go to war” with Rwanda, which he said was backing the rebel groups and which he called “a disruptive force in the Democratic Republic of Congo.” This scenario—and the threats that accompanied it—was almost exactly the same as the one that threatened the battery supply chain in the 2020s, when Rwanda supported a rebel group that took swaths of eastern Congo.
One trip led to another, and Katumba was sent to Washington with Gertler. The young minister met with Condoleezza Rice and explained to her the situation in Congo.
At one point, Gertler turned to Katumba and said, “Why are you blocking me?”
Katumba stayed silent. He understood that Gertler wanted him to promise something. But it was not in his gift to make any assurances; Kabila Jr. was biding his time before promising Gertler any more of Congo’s rich resources.
On July 21, 2002, Katumba wrote Gertler a note: “I got to know you better, thank you for what you did behind the scenes.” From that point onward, Katumba would later write, Gertler and the minister forged closer and closer relations. “This friendship developed, strong and beautiful, over the months and years,” Katumba remarked, “like a meeting between two men with profoundly similar spiritual convergences, despite their dissimilarities.”
* * *
In Washington, President Bush was keen to score a foreign-policy “win” as the first year of the war on terror drew to a close. He brought together Kabila Jr. and Rwanda’s Paul Kagame at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria, on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly, in September 2002.
“Paul, when are you leaving Congo?” Bush asked Kagame.
The Rwandan president assured him that he would be gone in three weeks.
Almost seven months later, in April 2003, the “final act” of the peace accord would be signed at Sun City, a South African resort and casino. But Gertler once again horned in on Congolese diplomacy: According to him, he put together a team that came up with some of the provisions, including a stipulation that Kabila Jr. would rule with four vice presidents from the different rebel factions. “Dan Gertler, through his actions, saved the lives of Congolese,” the Congolese politician Barnabé Kikaya Bin Karubi professed in a slick advertorial on Gertler’s website. “He helped stop a war in which DRC lost 6 million people. Through his actions, the war ended.” Gertler was clearly of the opinion that he had been in large part responsible for the peace agreement.
In reality, although the Sun City peace pact might have slowed the worst atrocities of the Second Congo War, it did not end the violence in the country. Rwanda, in particular, would continue to meddle in its neighbor’s affairs, sponsoring militias and exporting purloined minerals for decades.
Kabila Jr. had blocked Gertler from the precious-stones market, so the businessman started to look to the South, where fortunes were being made mining copper and a metal that Congo had in overwhelming abundance, a metal that more and more companies demanded for their lithium-ion batteries: cobalt.
* * *
It was one of those coincidences of history: Just as more and more lithium-ion batteries were being produced in Japan, the mines had come roaring back to life. Unlike in the 1970s, when the two Shaba wars spiked the price of cobalt so high that it made commercial sense to ship it out via airplane, Congo’s wars didn’t seem to affect the southern mines. In 1999, even as the older Kabila began to arm the Mai-Mai and war raged in Congo’s East, the copper-and-cobalt hubs of Lubumbashi and Kolwezi, as well as the road that connected them, seemed to be immune from the violence. Cobalt production, the U.S. Geological Survey’s Andrew L. Gulley found, “increased seven-fold from 1996 to 2003 despite two African wars over the DRC and its resources.” Thanks to this development, and the sale of the U.S. stockpiles, the global price of cobalt began falling at the end of the Mobutu regime, and prices crashed.
In 2002, with the help of Katumba, Congo instituted its first mining code since Mobutu’s fall. This was also the year that Gertler was shuttling back and forth between Congo and Washington on Kabila Jr.’s behalf. Gécamines, the mining company, had been destroyed in Mobutu’s downfall—the government was looking to round up international financing, and, of course, ensuring that money continued to flow to Kinshasa. Copper was booming on the back of a massive amount of demand from China, and cobalt prices had also begun to creep up. “Dan then moved away from diamonds and began to be interested in copper and cobalt in Katanga,” Katumba later remembered.
The jewel in the Katangese copper-and-cobalt crown was the Kamoto mine in Kolwezi, but it had already been acquired by Forrest, who stepped down as head of Gécamines after the assassination of Kabila Sr. Forrest had spent the past half decade rehabilitating the mine with money borrowed from banks. He thought it could be a landmark project in a country torn apart by war.
Gertler set his sights on Forrest’s mine, but he would have to cool his heels for the time being. In the meantime, he took a large stake in a neighboring project in Kolwezi, a giant agglomeration of some of the country’s highest-grade copper deposits, known as KOV (the initials standing for the ore bodies Kamoto, Oliveira, and Virgule), as well as the copper-cobalt mine of Kansuki, near the entrance to the city of Kolwezi. By the end of 2012, Gertler would be invested in companies that controlled 9.6 percent of global cobalt production. “This was approved by the transition” government after the peace accord had been signed, Katumba wrote. “No one found fault with it.”
As he developed his mines in Congo, Gertler discovered a talent for luring in investors, even as he and his companies took on loan after loan, becoming, in one businessman’s words, a “debt monster.” To convince people to place money with him, he deployed a network that included Beny Steinmetz, a businessman who was later convicted in Swiss court of bribing Guinea’s former first lady in order to acquire mining rights; Yaakov Weinroth, a high-powered lawyer who had represented Israel’s right-wing prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu; and a series of rabbis who explained to potential investors that Gertler had an almost mystical power to yield profits “beyond the natural order.”
But the reason for Gertler’s success was hardly supernatural: In fact, it was mainly thanks to Katumba, whom he paid handsomely for his services. For Gertler, Katumba was more than just a fixer; he was an essential part of the Israeli businessman’s operation. “If there is no Katumba, they also take away the [mining] license,” Gertler would later say. The Congolese politician came to Gertler’s house and behaved like he was an owner of the mines, and Gertler explained during the arbitration proceedings how he split his companies with him. “Katumba was the one who dealt with government officials, company CEOs, all the tax authorities who come and give tax bills all the time to the local community,” Gertler said. The Congolese politician held incredible power over the president and his ministers. As Gertler put it, “I think everyone who was in Congo understood that Katumba’s word was law.”
Forrest, who would be maneuvered out of his ownership of the Kamoto mine by Gertler, saw things differently from Katumba. “Despite the massive sacrifices that everyone made, and which we made to relaunch this flooded and therefore mothballed mine, they took the Kamoto mine away from us to give to Dan Gertler,” Forrest would later fume. He mused that Gertler’s strings were being pulled by powerful foreign multinationals. “It goes without saying that we lost lots of money, but that didn’t stop us from continuing, from believing in our country, and from pursuing our work there.”
Part 3
Battery Boom
“Globalization takes place only in capital and data. Everything else is damage control.”
—Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization
Chapter 20
Accelerating the Transition
The Tesla Gigafactory Berlin-Brandenburg, May 2024
The group of investors had formed fast friendships over the past couple of days, gathering into knots. A New York bank had arranged for them to visit automakers in Sweden and in Germany and France. It was late March 2024, their final day in Germany before heading to London. Europe was trying to show its best face: Among the sparring Chinese and U.S. elephants, European leaders were trying to position their countries to best take advantage of the green transition. A light drizzle washed over the fields and parking lots outside the Berlin airport hotel.
Two of the investors were sitting down for breakfast, having bowls of oatmeal before their final site visit. They sprinkled sugar into their coffees and jargon into their sentences—BEV for “battery electric vehicle,” ICE for “internal combustion engine.” They were people who wanted to make it very clear that they knew what they were talking about. “Two takeaways: We know electricity is the way. We know electricity is the best type of power, but the best power infrastructure is not there,” a Belgian fund manager said. “Second takeaway: The Chinese are also coming after the market.”
“They aren’t so vertically integrated,” his colleague, a New York–based investor, replied.
“One question: Where is the Tesla factory?” the Belgian wondered. “Can I get easily from downtown Berlin to there?”
“It’s rural enough that some people in the countryside attacked it,” the American said. “What would you call it? Environmental protests? Environmental terrorism?”
It turned out that the Tesla factory—the Gigafactory, to use the moniker that the company’s CEO, Elon Musk, had given all his plants after he built the first one in Nevada in 2013—was not far. It was just under half an hour away.
Part of Tesla’s raison d’être, Musk would tell his growing legion of online fans through the 2000s and 2010s, was altruistic. He wanted the large auto companies to adopt lithium-ion and thus reduce carbon emissions. Plus, Musk found it cool.
At a meeting for Tesla employees in early 2009, Musk read from a slide: “What’s cooler than making a hot product, a sexy product, that also saves the world!”
Now Tesla was being critiqued for its own deleterious impact on the environment. Since February, a group of protesters had been camping out near the factory in the damp forest around the community of Grünheide. They were protesting the more than three hundred thousand cars a year that Tesla pumped onto the streets of Germany and Europe. “An electric car creates a huge ecological footprint through the consumption of resources and thus drives the global climate catastrophe even further,” one of the group’s manifestos read. The “neocolonial supply chains” that fed the Tesla machine were, they argued, contributing to polluting the world more than they were saving it from global warming. “Whole swathes of land and ecosystems are devastated as water is either used for mining or returned to contaminated groundwater. And the people who live in these areas, often in the global South, are being robbed of their livelihoods by mining,” they went on. “Instead of perpetuating car capitalism in a green guise, we are fighting to end it!”
Just over a month after the bankers visited, eight hundred protesters would attack the Gigafactory, clashing with police who prevented them from crossing the boundary into Musk territory. “Why do the police let the left-wing protestors off so easily?” Musk griped on the social-media app Twitter (which he had renamed X) after the release of video footage showing masked disruptors, clad in black, charging toward the factory.
* * *
At the checkpoint outside the factory, the bus carrying the investors was turned around. The driver, whose phone ringtone was set to the 1990 hit “Wind of Change,” a song by the German rock band Scorpions that presaged the fall of the Soviet Union, grumbled a bit and then pulled into a parking lot a little way off from the main building. Outside, some of the investors dashed through the fizzling rain; others turned their collars up and flipped the cameras on their phones to snap selfies. The Gigafactory would probably be the most iconic stop on their trip.
Tesla’s facility had been built at an astonishing speed in a country with a reputation for red tape. After Musk’s November 2019 announcement of the factory’s construction, Tesla had started to clear a swath of pine plantation so that it could begin building. The company had constructed the factory using temporary permits up until March 2022, when the first full permit was issued. Musk personally delivered the first thirty cars to their new owners later that month.
These were facts that a rep sporting a leather bomber jacket à la Musk did not gloss over as he welcomed the investors into Tesla’s steel-and-glass building, then led them up to a conference room with Tesla car doors hung on the walls like abstract sculptures. On a wall at the back of an office space was a sign whose last line had been partially obscured by a television monitor. It read oddly, like a clipped haiku:
Our mission:
To Accelerate the world’s transition
[To Sustainable Energy]
The razing of the pines had angered local environmentalists even before Disrupt had begun its campout. A proposed battery factory next door, which Tesla promised would create ten thousand new jobs, stoked their rage even further. Environmentalists filed a lawsuit against Tesla in early 2020 to try and halt construction. Musk’s lawyers pointed out that the felled pines had been planted there to make cardboard, and a German court allowed Tesla to proceed. Ramona Pop, a senior member of the Green Party, publicly backed the project. “We need to keep some perspective,” Pop said. “Tesla’s future investment should be allowed quickly for clean mobility and climate protection.”
The investors donned hard hats and protective goggles (“Sometimes sparks fly up”) and moved through a netherworld of loading bays. Men with tattooed arms took long hits of nicotine-laced vapor and stared blankly into space. They were, in Teslaspeak, “production associates.” Twelve thousand people worked at the factory. Some were Ukrainian refugees. Others chatted away in Turkish.
Inside was a nightclub for roughshod demons. Techno beats competed with the clanging of machinery. Gargantuan robots named King Kong and Godzilla lifted vehicles onto conveyors. The factory is meant to produce the body of a Tesla Model Y, the company’s compact crossover SUV, every forty-five seconds. The production line moved like a river along the factory floor, with workers rushing up to cars and going to town on them, installing lights, computers, upholstery. The pace was frenetic. Electric trucks whirred about and missed whacking into the investors by mere inches.
Be Neat, read signs on the wall. Be on Time. And also: Leave Behind Your Comfort Zone.
The velocity of Tesla’s production comes at a cost. In 2023, reporters from the German magazine Stern investigated a trove of safety documents from the Gigafactory in Brandenburg and found that “serious accidents happen almost daily.” At the factory, Tesla had also installed an illegal diesel station, hidden under a party tent, and leaked feces into the water supply. The magazine accused the local government of selling out to Tesla. In response, local politicians and Tesla denied the claims and said there had not been a significant increase in workplace accidents. But Tesla has also been accused of fostering a “toxic” culture in its U.S. factories; in The Nation, Bryce Covert reported that at one Gigafactory, workers said they were “putting ourselves at even more danger” to meet quotas.
