These thing can happen by accident also. If it is generally known that there are only a few places in the world that you get lithium from, then investors are go

These thing can happen by accident also. If it is generally known that there are only a few places in the world that you get lithium from, then investors are going to think that lithium is very risky and may run out. They don't tend to think, "Hey, it is the third lightest element, in theory there should be loads of it, perhaps we are only mining the cheapest possible sources", which is the actual truth of the matter. So while the people inside the industry might know the potential availability, investors on the whole do not and so the market only gets enough money to expand conservatively, rather than enough to kick off a magnitude more resource acquisition at a significantly higher raw material cost.