Critical Metals is now worth more than $3 billion. It had only four full-time employees at the end of June
The rare earth trade has been heating up, even in tiny stocks with very few employees.
Since President Trump’s interest in the sector kicked off a flurry of buying activity, the hottest trade on Wall Street has been in rare earth stocks.
Names like Critical Metals, MP Materials, USA Rare Earth, and United States Antimony Corp. have soared as investors wager that the US government’s involvement in the sector — which has included directly buying stakes in some companies, providing financing for others, and greenlighting a growing number of projects — will continue. With China recently stepping up restrictions on exporting rare earth metals, those bets have turned out to be well made.
Critical Metals Corp., which engages in the mining, exploration, and development of lithium metals via its Wolfsberg and Tanbreez projects, has been one of the biggest beneficiaries. From a market cap in early May that was below $150 million, the company’s stock has soared, turning it into a more than $3 billion entity as of yesterday’s close. That’s more than what embattled fitness equipment maker Peloton is worth.
In early October, CRML, which has a 92% stake in Greenland’s biggest rare earths mining project, leaped after rumors swirled that the US government was looking at taking a stake in the company. Sources later cited by Bloomberg denied that such a deal was being considered — but that hasn’t stopped the stock from taking off.
A good example of just how far investors are willing to bet on the future, CRML reported revenue — technically “other income,” which was from European Union grants or interest on cash sat on deposit — of just ~$560,000 (a typical McDonald’s restaurant does about 7x as much in a year) in its most recent fiscal year, ended June 30, 2025. Most striking of all, however, is its employee base [emphasis our own]:
“As of June 30, 2025, we had 4 full-time employees with a significant number of personnel engaged on a contractor basis. We believe we have good relations with our employees.”
That is, obviously, an astonishingly low headcount for a billion-dollar company. But what’s more astonishing is that it doesn’t seem to preclude a major deal from happening: Trilogy Metals, which has surged alongside CRML and the rest of the rare earth winners, secured a $35.6 million strategic investment by the US federal government on October 6. Trilogy Metals reported just five full-time employees in its most recent filings.
As my colleague Luke Kawa astutely observed at the end of September: why follow the Fed when you can follow the feds?
