Lithium Americas Stock: The Thacker Pass Restructuring

Lithium Americas (NYSE: LAC) delivered the first proof of the pattern Matt McCall builds his entire “Trump’s $16 Trillion Chess Move” presentation around. In the pitch’s words, the government’s Thacker Pass restructuring left the stock “up 204% in less than a month.” That is the opening exhibit in a three-company chain, Lithium Americas, Trilogy Metals, USA Rare Earth, that McCall uses to argue the U.S. government has begun taking direct equity stakes in the critical-minerals supply chain, and that the next stake is where the biggest profits sit.

Here is what actually happened with LAC, and how it anchors the pitch’s argument.

The Thacker Pass Deal

Thacker Pass in Nevada is the largest known lithium deposit in the United States, and building it is a multi-billion-dollar project. On September 30, 2025, the U.S. government restructured its loan support for the project into a roughly 10% equity stake in Lithium Americas, a real, documented transaction. The restructuring converted the government from lender to part-owner, putting a federal agency on the shareholder register of a public lithium miner for the first time at this scale. For more on that, see our “Lithium Americas Stock Valuation After the Restructuring” piece.

The market’s response is the pattern’s first data point: the stock roughly tripled in the weeks around the announcement, the “204% in less than a month” figure McCall cites. The logic was straightforward. A development-stage miner’s biggest risks are financing and construction. A government equity stake de-risks both: the financing partner is now the U.S. Treasury’s sphere, and the project’s completion has become a matter of federal policy rather than capital-market appetite.

Why It Matters Beyond Lithium

The Thacker Pass restructuring set the template the pitch’s other exhibits followed. On October 6, 2025, the government took its stake connected to Trilogy Metals’ Ambler Access Project in Alaska (shares up 440% in a week, per the pitch). In January 2026, the Commerce Department took its stake in USA Rare Earth for the Round Top deposit in Texas (“shares went vertical”). MP Materials’ earlier DoD deal preceded them all. Each case repeated the structure: a strategic mineral, a project the government wants built, and equity as the price of commitment. We walk through the full story in our “USA Rare Earth Stock: The Round Top Equity Stake” article.

McCall’s larger pitch argues that this pattern points at one specific next target: a deep-sea mining company holding rights to polymetallic nodules, with Executive Order 14285 (“Unleashing America’s Offshore Critical Minerals and Resources”) directing officials toward offtake agreements and stockpile feasibility, and with, per the pitch, one roughly-$5 company owning the only U.S.-flagged vessel capable of harvesting the nodules. Our coverage of The Metals Company fingerprint and the deep-sea mining explainer cover that story in full; LAC is the precedent that makes it believable.

The Valuation Question, Honestly

Does a government stake make a stock worth 204% more? The honest answer splits the move into two parts. Part one is genuine de-risking: federal partnership materially changes the probability the project gets built, which is real fundamental value for a developer. Part two is repricing the story: speculation that government backing is a recurring catalyst, which the market front-runs and which mean-reverts when the catalyst count disappoints. LAC still has to execute the construction and hit production targets; the stake changed the odds, not the physics.

The same test applies to the pattern’s next targets: government backing identifies strategic priority, markets reprice instantly, and execution decides the rest. McCall concedes the uncertainty in his own words: “Nobody knows for sure if Trump will ultimately back this company. Nothing is final until that ink is dry.”

Why Thacker Pass Matters to the Whole Chain

It helps to understand why this deposit, specifically, was the government’s first equity move. Thacker Pass is the largest known lithium resource in the United States, and lithium is the front-end of the energy transition’s mineral chain: every electric vehicle battery, grid storage installation, and defense system increasingly depends on it. Domestic lithium supply was, until recently, nearly nonexistent, which made the deposit a strategic single point of failure. When the pitch frames LAC’s 204% move as the proof of a pattern, the honest version is that the government chose the most strategically irreplaceable project first; later picks (Trilogy’s road, USA Rare Earth’s Round Top, the seabed) test whether the pattern extends beyond the obvious cases. That hierarchy is the real information in the sequence.

The Risks to Hold Alongside the Story

For anyone researching LAC on the back of the pitch: lithium prices are cyclical and the market is well supplied; Thacker Pass still faces construction ramp risk; and policy support, however strong today, is a political variable that can change with administrations. The pitch’s own candor block applies to this whole family: “it’s just a small, speculative stock. Situations like this carry real risk and they can move violently in both directions.”

For the presenter’s record, see our profile of Matt McCall; for the sibling campaign, our XAI Boom review.

The full presentation, with the government-stake chain and the main deep-sea pick, is available through this link.

Lithium Americas is the case that proved the government will pay for critical minerals with equity. Whether the pattern’s next recipient repeats the 204% is exactly the bet the pitch is selling, and now you know how the first one happened.

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