1789 Capital's Chris Buskirk on cheap energy as the key to national competitiveness and the rare earth magnet opportunity

Summary

Chris Buskirk, co-founder of 1789 Capital, sees the current business climate as the strongest in years, describing a wave of founders and investors who say regulatory relief in early 2025 revealed opportunities they had stopped imagining were possible. The sentiment is less about any single policy win and more about a broad unlocking of ambition across AI, crypto, nuclear, and defense.

Energy as the Core Competitive Variable

Buskirk's central investment thesis is blunt: the large-scale civilization with access to the most abundant and cheapest energy wins, full stop. He frames energy not as one sector among many but as the underlying variable that determines outcomes across AI infrastructure, national security, robotics, and space. The analogy he uses is terraforming Mars, which he describes as fundamentally an energy problem, not a technology or logistics one.

His concern is concrete. Multiple analyses he cites project that U.S. AI compute buildout through 2035 would require more electricity than the entire country currently produces. That gap makes energy capacity a national security issue, not just an infrastructure one.

1789 Capital's focus areas are AI, AI infrastructure, energy, robotics, space, and defense, with energy treated as the connective tissue running through all of them.

Rare Earth Magnets: The Strategic Opening

Buskirk identifies rare earth magnets as one of the clearest examples of where government must intervene because the competitive dynamic is a state actor versus a private company, not company versus company. China has subsidized the sector for roughly 20 years, reaching a point where a finished rare earth magnet sourced from a Chinese supplier is cheaper than buying the raw materials domestically in the U.S.

His read on the tariff negotiations is pointed. When China restricted rare earth exports in response to Liberation Day tariffs, it played what he calls its rarest card too early. The optimal moment, he argues, would have been during a Taiwan contingency. By deploying that leverage in a trade negotiation, China gave the U.S. time to build domestic capacity.

Apple's reported $500 million rare earth purchase from MP Materials, based in Las Vegas and covered by the Wall Street Journal, is cited as a signal that major supply chain holders are quietly repositioning. Buskirk reads it as a practical hedge rather than an ideological stance, describing Apple as turning the tiller even if it is a slow-moving ship.

1789 Capital is in the process of investing in Vulcan Elements, a company building domestic rare earth magnet manufacturing capacity. Buskirk describes the window to build out a full U.S. rare earth ecosystem as real and rapidly closing, noting that standing up this capacity was a pipe dream four or five months ago and is now actively happening.

Solar: Skepticism Without Dismissal

On photovoltaic solar, Buskirk is cautious. He owns solar panels at his Arizona home but describes PV as not meaningfully economic at current technology levels, and questions why the sector warrants significant focus when nuclear is available. He acknowledges PV's load-matching advantage, since peak solar generation aligns with peak air conditioning demand, but stops short of treating that as a compelling investment case. His implicit preference is to scale nuclear and not over-engineer around solar's limitations.

His broader point on China's energy dominance is that Beijing has said yes to everything, solar, rare earths, batteries, coal, and accumulated capacity across all vectors without trying to predict which one would matter most. He sees that breadth as the actual competitive threat, not dominance in any single category.