President Donald Trump is known to be fond of shiny objects. On Wednesday, Aug. 6, in the Oval Office, Apple CEO Tim Cook sought to sway Trump against tariffing his company’s imports with a gold and glass plaque inscribed just for him. Impressed by the gift as Trump clearly was, a more consequential shiny object that has caught his attention is KoBold Metals, a new mining tech company backed by Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos.

The Trump administration recently helped KoBold sew up a deal to venture into the lawless hinterlands of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Arranged, according to KoBold, by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the State Department’s senior adviser for Africa, Massad Boulos, the deal will see KoBold acquire Australia’s AVZ Minerals’ interest in the Roche Dure lithium deposit located at Manono.

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The administration sees projects like this as a key to the national critical mineral strategy, its goal of challenging China’s geoeconomic maneuvers, and its effort to broker peace in the fractious African country. Upon the deal’s signing, KoBold described it as “a broad agreement for the company to lead a wave of American investment in the country under the investment and security framework being advanced by [Congolese President Felix Tshisekedi] and [President Trump].” Boulos, meanwhile, described the framework as “represent[ing] concrete progress in advancing security, economic cooperation, and the shared pursuit of peace and prosperity.” 

KoBold proposes that it is disrupting the mining industry using cutting-edge geoscience, comprehensive data aggregation, and artificial intelligence. Last summer, KoBold announced that its tech had revealed a copper lode in Zambia larger than any found in a decade. It’s innovative — indeed, bold. And there’s no doubt such applications of technology will be crucial as the global economy becomes ever more dependent on mineral resources.

Yet the Congo deal may be a product of “shiny object syndrome” as much as anything else.

Implicit in KoBold’s marketing is a critique of the traditional mining industry. Its website features nothing more prominently than its six ethical pillars: worker safety, anticorruption, community support, environmental protection, antidiscrimination, and integrity. The company prides itself on hiring “innovators of color, women innovators, and LGBTQ innovators everywhere we work.” One wonders how successful they’ll be with that in a region known for sectarian violence against women.

For all its promise, though, KoBold has yet to dig up ore or even operate a mine at all.

This isn’t the first time a flashy but unproven startup has gotten the president’s attention. Back in 2020, his first administration was instrumental in the rise of Lordstown Motors. Lordstown was an electric vehicle startup founded a year earlier that had taken over an old GM plant in Ohio. In June, then-Vice President Mike Pence visited the plant and hopped into the cab of a Lordstown Endurance pickup truck, touting Lordstown as a key player in America’s industrial comeback. In September, standing next to an Endurance parked in front of the White House, Trump called the truck a “really unique thing” and “the wave of the future.” 

During the SPAC craze later that year, Lordstown started trading on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol RIDE. But by June 2021, things had already unraveled as the company’s inability to make a working vehicle became apparent. It filed for bankruptcy in 2023, and its remaining plant was just sold off by the current owner to become a data center on Aug. 5.

BETWEEN RWANDA AND CONGO, THE US PICKED THE WRONG SIDE

One of the classic traps of industrial policy is opting for style over substance — a tendency toward high-visibility projects with fancy buzzwords and celebrity favoritism. KoBold might be the American company that reinvigorates the mining sector. Or it might be the next Lordstown. And while Lordstown was little more than egg on the administration’s face in the end, the Congo project appears to entail costly security guarantees for an inexperienced player in one of the world’s most dangerous regions.

America’s mineral strategy and its industrial policy more broadly require urgent government action to clear the way for American companies to roll up their sleeves and get their hands dirty again. KoBold Metals has no proven track record of doing so and very little on-the-ground history overall. With Reuters reporting that the deal might actually breach an existing international arbitration order, the administration’s embrace of it looks as much like the “shiny object syndrome” as it does a strategic calculation.

Jordan McGillis is the economics editor of City Journal.