In the Tesla Daily interview with Alex Potter, Alex emphasized that a battery raw material supply crunch is coming. If there's not enough Lithium or Nickel or whatever available, even if an OEM builds a battery factory, what's going to feed into it? Alex noted that since Tesla never questioned their own future scale, they would have locked in supply contracts 5 years ago, while OEMs are just thinking about that now as they press-release their battery factory plans and maybe it occurs to them that the battery manufacturer/JV partner isn't just going to be able to materialize ore out of thin air.
Alex and Rob had apparently just come out of a "Battery Summit" event where the battery industry players repeated that a new mine takes 7-10 years to get running, so for all those without contracts in place, well, the phrase they actually used was "SOL".
Meanwhile, iron is cheap and plentiful, but nobody except Tesla has demonstrated the ability to get decent range out of an LFP pack. With $50B could GM engineer their way to a more efficient vehicle? Well, if they could, why wouldn't we have seen even basic steps in that direction by now? Every EV would benefit from the same range out of a smaller pack, but I don't see GM innovating on efficiency much, and Lucid has gotten a bit too pricey to acquire...