The case for critical minerals is not hard to make. Copper, nickel, cobalt, lithium, and the rare earths all feed the electrification and defense supply chains, and most of the processing sits outside the United States — the same structural story our rare earth stocks explainer covers in depth. That is the serious, structural story that gets told in boardrooms and policy papers alike. It is also the story Jim Rickards leans on in his “$150 Trillion Birthright” presentation for model Press.
Rickards is a former general counsel at Long-Term Capital Management and a best-selling author on currency and geopolitics, and he runs model Press’s Strategic Intelligence letter. His pitch opens with a bold claim, that President Trump “opened 650 million acres of federal land containing an estimated $150 trillion in buried minerals,” and that three small companies could dominate the technology used to find those minerals before anyone digs. The real question for critical minerals investors is whether the three names he points to actually ride that wave.
The Birthright Thesis, Step by Step
The mechanism Rickards describes has a coherent core. If new federal acreage opens and companies race to explore it, the firms that sell survey data and imaging equipment see more orders. In the pitch, mining companies are “legally required to find the exact location of these mineral deposits BEFORE they can dig a single hole,” and “the market for their services could explode from $2 billion to $100 billion over the next 12 months.” Surveyors are the picks-and-shovels of resource exploration: they get paid whether or not a client strikes metal.
That logic holds up as far as it goes. The problem is the next step, where the thesis attaches three specific oil and gas seismic companies to a mining story that is, for them, mostly hypothetical.
The Three Names Behind the Tease
The presentation names three “MDP” picks, short for mineral discovery technology. They are Geospace Technologies, a maker of land and marine seismic equipment with about $116 million in trailing revenue; TGS ASA, the Norwegian energy-data firm formed from the 2023 TGS and PGS merger; and MIND Technology, a maker of offshore seismic hardware under the Seamap brand with about $46 million in annual revenue.
Since the tease, the scoreboard is instructive. Geospace is down 73.8% and MIND is down 56.8%, while TGS is up 8.9%. That is one single-digit gain and two large losses, set against promised gains of “1,520% gain potential” to “4,800% gain potential.” We broke down the deep sea side of this story in our deep-sea mining explainer and the AI angle in our mineral exploration coverage.
The Category Gap Worth Watching
The honest read is that these are oil and gas seismic companies. Their revenue has tracked energy exploration budgets, not mineral discovery, for decades. TGS and MIND both had their moment during the 2010 to 2012 oil bull market and gave most of it back. Framing them as a pure play on a mining boom means betting that a small sliver of their business becomes the main driver, a leap the pitch never justifies with numbers.
The institutional-ownership claim is another wrinkle. The ad says one of the picks has institutional ownership of “only 8%,” implying retail investors are getting in early. Our teardown put the actual figure near 67%. The “undiscovered” framing does not survive contact with the ownership structure.
Which Minerals, and Why They Matter
The minerals themselves are worth naming, because the story is stronger than any single promo. Copper is the wiring metal for electrification, lithium and nickel feed batteries, cobalt hardens them, and the rare earths power the magnets in everything from wind turbines to missiles. The United States imports a large share of several of these, which is a genuine policy concern and the reason there has been bipartisan work to expand domestic mining, processing, and recycling. The Birthright pitch borrows that legitimate urgency and attaches it to three survey companies. The honest link is indirect: more exploration, whether for oil or for minerals, means more surveys sold and more data licensed. What it does not mean is that a seismic company becomes a critical minerals company overnight, and that gap is where most of the promotional stretch lives. Investors who want direct exposure should look to miners and processors first, then decide whether the survey layer is a better way to play the activity.
A Fair Way to Think About It
None of this means the critical minerals story is wrong. It means the vehicles being offered to play it are an imperfect match. A genuine resurgence in energy exploration would help all three companies, and the pick-and-shovel logic remains a lower-risk way to bet on activity than a single discovery. If you want the fuller policy picture, we covered it in our critical minerals strategy explainer.
The offer behind the pitch is The Situation Report at $1,995 per year with no refunds, and the headline numbers are promotional forecasts, not promises. Wait for evidence that exploration spending is actually rising before treating any of the three as a secret about to surge.
Ready to see the research? Click here to view the American Birthright presentation.
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