Mountain Pass, California is the only active rare earth mining and processing facility in the Western Hemisphere. The mine at its center produces neodymium and praseodymium — the metals that go into the permanent magnets inside every electric vehicle motor, wind turbine, missile guidance system, and fighter jet actuator on earth.
MP Materials is the company that owns Mountain Pass. James H. Litinsky is its chairman and CEO. Between April 17 and June 3, 2026, Litinsky sold $77.9 million in MP Materials stock, reported on four Form 4 filings.
His suspicion score in the dataset is 29/20 — a score that exceeds the 20-point maximum because the scoring model's multiple flag categories each fired simultaneously. He is the highest-scored individual in the dataset. Suspects Dashboard →
The Four Filings
| DATE | AMOUNT | SHARES · PLAN | SCORE | CORRELATED EVENT |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apr 17–20, 2026 | $19.2M | 300,000 · 10b5-1 plan | 29/20 | Apr 17: Greenland approves Critical Metals (CRML) raising its Tanbreez stake to 92.5%. Pre-Iran conflict flag. Pre-sanctions flag. Critical minerals flag. Massive liquidation flag. |
| May 12–13, 2026 | $19.6M | 300,000 · no plan box | 25/20 | Pre-Iran conflict. Critical minerals cluster. Pre-sanctions window. |
| May 27–29, 2026 | $26.2M | 400,000 · no plan box | 25/20 | Three-day sale via trust vehicle. Oman threat/OXY cluster same window. Hormuz-by-June-15 Polymarket spike coincides. |
| Jun 3, 2026 | $12.8M | 185,167 · no plan box | HIGH | Post-DoD contract announcement window. China REE export controls tightening. Kvanefjeld rejection finalizing. |
The DoD Contract
The Pentagon awarded MP Materials a 10-year contract for neodymium-praseodymium magnets at a floor price of $110 per kilogram — a guaranteed price floor that makes the contract a revenue-certainty instrument as much as a procurement agreement.
The contract was part of the administration's critical minerals supply chain initiative — an explicit national security response to Chinese dominance of rare earth processing. China controls approximately 85 percent of global rare earth processing capacity. MP Materials' Mountain Pass facility is the primary domestic alternative.
The floor-price guarantee means the DoD contract is more valuable as rare earth prices fall — and less necessary as they rise. The contract, in other words, is most useful when MP Materials' stock price is under pressure. It is a price support mechanism embedded in a national security rationale.
The China Response
The Supply Bottleneck
What Has Not Been Shown
No evidence of advance knowledge of the DoD contract terms by Litinsky before public announcement. No evidence that China's export-control listing was known to MP Materials management before it was publicly disclosed. The April 17 Tanbreez correlation is a statistical coincidence of the dataset — it does not establish that Litinsky traded on Tanbreez-related information. The suspicion score of 29/20 reflects multiple simultaneous flag categories, not a determination of wrongdoing. The April sales were made under a 10b5-1 plan adopted in September 2025; the May and June filings do not check the plan box. No SEC investigation has been announced. The public record ends here.
Behind the curtain, no wizard to find. Just a thunder organ, a wallet, and scaffolding left behind.
The noise is the point. The scaffolding is the story.