The “Biggest Threat SpaceX Has Ever Faced” Pick Turns Out to Be a Nickel and Iron-Ore Miner

The Hook

Marc Lichtenfeld’s Oxford Income Letter sells for $99 a year with a 365-day refund, and the promo that pushes it leans on one of the stronger fear hooks in the current rotation: “the single biggest threat SpaceX has ever faced.” The setup is a 2021 supply scare, and the promo tells it like a near-miss at the launch pad:

“Back in 2021, at the height of the COVID pandemic, SpaceX nearly had to delay its entire launch program because they couldn’t get enough liquid oxygen.”

That sentence is doing the emotional work. SpaceX is the most watched private company of the past decade, and the image of its rockets grounded because of something as mundane as oxygen taps directly into a “hidden chokepoint” anxiety. From there the pitch smooths the path from fear to ticker: one company “didn’t just sign a supply deal with SpaceX. They broke ground on a brand new $100 million facility built for one purpose, to keep SpaceX’s rockets in the air.”

There is a real story inside that hook. During the 2021 COVID waves, medical oxygen demand spiked while production and trucking were strained, and SpaceX leadership did publicly warn that a liquid oxygen shortage could stall launches. The promo is not inventing the incident. What it does with the incident is where the teardown gets interesting.

The Big Claim

Strip away the SpaceX packaging and the claim is that there is a “secret” supplier sitting at the intersection of Elon Musk’s two most famous businesses, and that owning it is the way to profit from both the rocket program and the electric-car program at once. The promo actually leads to two names. One is Linde (LIN), the industrial gas giant that supplies SpaceX’s liquid oxygen, which we have already teardown on this site, so we will not redo that here. The other is Vale (VALE), the Brazilian mining giant, and that is the name this brief is scoped to.

The link to Vale runs through Tesla rather than SpaceX. The promo argues:

“Every long-range Tesla runs on high-performance lithium-ion batteries, and those batteries depend on one critical metal above all others, nickel. In fact, Elon Musk himself has called nickel his single biggest concern.”

So the full pitch is a two-company bundle sold under one headline: a rocket fuel supplier (Linde) and a battery-metal miner (Vale), both rebranded as “the answer to the biggest threat SpaceX has ever faced.” The claim that ties them together is the adjacency to Musk. That adjacency is real in both cases. Whether it is material is a different question, and it is the question that matters. We walk through the full story in our “Sherritt International: What You Need to Know” article.

The Mechanism

Let me explain what Vale actually is, because the promo never really does. Vale is one of the largest mining companies on earth, and its two big products are iron ore and nickel, with copper and a few other metals as smaller contributors.

Iron ore is the main event. Vale is one of the world’s largest iron ore producers, and most of that ore is sold to China, where it feeds the steel industry that builds apartments, bridges, rail, and manufacturing capacity. That means Vale’s core revenue engine is not SpaceX, not Tesla, not even batteries. It is Chinese steel demand, which itself tracks Chinese property and infrastructure spending. When China is building, iron ore prices and Vale’s earnings rise together. When Chinese property cools, the opposite happens. That is the single most important fact about owning Vale, and it is a fact the SpaceX packaging hides completely.

Nickel is the secondary but faster-growing part of the story. Vale is a major nickel producer, and nickel matters to electric vehicles because high-nickel cathode chemistries give batteries more energy density, which is what enables long range. This is the part of the pitch that is actually true. Long-range Teslas do use high-nickel batteries, and Elon Musk really did, on an earnings call, plead with miners to produce more nickel and call supply his biggest concern as he scaled up production. Nickel for batteries is a genuine, multi-decade demand theme.

The problem is the way the promo connects these two. The liquid oxygen shortage belongs to Linde’s story, not Vale’s. Vale does not supply SpaceX with liquid oxygen, and no amount of “keep SpaceX’s rockets in the air” language changes that. The nickel story is a Tesla story, not a SpaceX story. By packaging both under a single SpaceX scare headline, the promo implies a shared “Elon Musk supply chain” thesis that does not actually exist as one investment. SpaceX and Tesla are two different companies with two different supply chains. A rocket burns liquid oxygen and kerosene or methane. A car battery runs on nickel, lithium, cobalt, and manganese. The only thing uniting them is that the same person runs both, which is a narrative, not a thesis.

The mining-cycle reality is what the promo skips. Nickel and iron ore are both commodities, which means Vale’s profitability is a function of prices it does not control. Iron ore prices live and die with Chinese property. Nickel prices have been volatile for years, dragged down by a wave of Indonesian supply even while EV demand grows. That is the normal life of a cyclical miner: great years and lean years, and the difference between them is set in Beijing and Jakarta, not in Boca Chica, Texas.

The Real Pick

Current prices are as of the October 27, 2026 close, from Polygon.

Vale trades as an American depositary receipt, and its market cap is about $50.39 billion at this price. That is a large, liquid, blue-chip mining name, which is worth noting because the promo’s “secret supplier” framing suggests something small and undiscovered. A $50 billion miner is neither small nor undiscovered. For context, the other name in the promo, Linde, closed at $508.65 against a $501.89 tease price, up about 1.35%, but that name is already covered on this site and is not the focus here.

Does the Math Check Out

Let me start with the part of the math that is easiest to verify: the immateriality of the SpaceX adjacency. StockGumshoe’s own teardown of the Linde side already did this arithmetic, and it is worth carrying over because the same logic applies to Vale in an even harsher form. Even if you doubled the space-propellants portion of Linde’s business, it moves Linde’s total revenue by only 1 to 2 percent. The “SpaceX adjacency” is real, but it is a rounding error against a company the size of Linde.

Now apply the same lens to Vale, and the connection gets weaker still. Vale does not sell liquid oxygen to SpaceX at all. Its Musk adjacency runs through nickel for Tesla batteries, and even there the relationship is indirect: Vale sells nickel into global markets, not to Tesla directly under some long-term “keep the rockets in the air” contract. Nickel is a commodity with a global price. Whether Vale’s nickel ends up in a Tesla, a stainless steel sink, or a nickel pig iron batch for Chinese steelmakers is determined by the market, not by a supply agreement. So the “broke ground on a $100 million facility to keep SpaceX flying” imagery, which is really Linde’s story, simply does not attach to Vale. There is no SpaceX facility in Vale’s capital program.

Then there is the income question, and this is where the Oxford Income Letter branding collides with the actual security. Vale does pay a dividend, and it has sometimes paid a large one. But it is a variable dividend tied to commodity prices and free cash flow, not the steady, growing payout an income investor is looking for. When iron ore prices are strong, Vale’s dividend can look fantastic. When they fall, the payout gets cut, and it has been cut before. That is what a cyclical miner’s “income” looks like: it behaves like a cyclical, not like a bond. Selling Vale inside a product called the Income Letter frames a commodity swing trade as a reliable income stream, and those are not the same thing.

The tease-price math is the last piece. Vale closed at $11.84 against a $13.02 tease price, down about 9%. That is not a catastrophic decline and it is not evidence the thesis is broken; it is more likely just iron ore and nickel doing what commodity stocks do between the time an ad is written and the time a reader sees it. The point is simply that the direction and the size of that move are being driven by commodity markets and China, which is exactly the story the promo chose not to tell.

The Verdict

Vale is a legitimate, world-class nickel and iron ore producer, and the nickel-for-EV-batteries thesis is a real one with a long runway. If you want exposure to battery metals and Chinese steel demand, Vale is a perfectly reasonable way to get it. But buy the miner on its own cyclical merits, not because of a SpaceX scare story that does not actually touch Vale’s business. The “single biggest threat SpaceX has ever faced” hook points at a liquid oxygen supplier that is a different company, and the “income letter” wrapper points at a commodity cyclical whose payout rises and falls with prices it cannot control. None of that is a reason to avoid Vale; it is just a reason to be honest about what you are buying and why. For more on that, see our “Vale Stock: What Investors Need to Know” piece.

What They Got Right

• The nickel-for-EV-batteries thesis is genuine. High-nickel cathodes really do enable long range, and Vale is a major nickel producer, so there is a real fundamental story underneath the hype.
• Elon Musk did publicly flag nickel supply as a major constraint, and treating battery metals as a bottleneck in the EV rollout is a legitimate, well-sourced view.
• Vale is a real operating business with world-class assets, enormous scale, and actual earnings, not a pre-revenue concept stock or a promotional shell.
• The 2021 liquid oxygen shortage was a real event, and the promo is not inventing the supply scare it uses as its hook.
• The 365-day refund on a $99 subscription is genuinely consumer-friendly and gives a reader a low-cost way to look at the research without much risk.

What They Got Wrong

• The headline conflates two different companies into one “Elon Musk” narrative. SpaceX burns liquid oxygen (a Linde story) and Tesla batteries use nickel (a Vale story). These are separate supply chains, and mashing them together under one scare headline is marketing, not analysis.
• The “keep SpaceX’s rockets in the air” language attaches to Vale, but Vale does not supply SpaceX with liquid oxygen. The $100 million facility quote is Linde’s, and the SpaceX adjacency is immaterial to Vale’s actual revenue.
• The “income letter” framing misrepresents a cyclical miner. Vale’s dividend is variable and tied to commodity prices, and it has been cut in down cycles. That is not a reliable income stream.
• The promo hides the real driver. Vale’s earnings are set primarily by Chinese property and steel demand for iron ore, a fact that never appears in the pitch because it does not fit the SpaceX story.
• The “secret supplier” tone is misleading for a $50 billion blue-chip ADR. This is one of the largest mining companies in the world, not an undiscovered chokepoint play.

Compliance Disclaimer

This is not financial advice. NewsletterVetter has no position in any stock mentioned.

NewsletterVetter is an independent publication. We receive compensation from some of the services we review through affiliate links. Nothing on this site is investment advice.