Why Robert Friedland Says the S&P’s 1% Mining Weight is a National Risk
Why Robert Friedland told President Trump that Wall Street is ignoring the most critical industry on Earth, and how a $12 billion stockpile aims to force a correction.
The most alarming statistic uttered in Washington this week wasn’t about the deficit, inflation, or polling data. It was a simple, stark percentage dropped by mining magnate Robert Friedland while sitting across from President Donald Trump: one percent.
That is the current weight of the mining sector in the S&P 500.
In the Oval Office on February 2, 2026, amidst the launch of the administration’s ambitious Project Vault, this single digit laid bare a terrifying disconnect. The companies that dig the actual building blocks of the modern world out of the ground, providing the copper for data centers, the lithium for batteries, and the gallium for defense systems, have become a rounding error in the world’s most important financial index. While trillion-dollar tech giants dominate the leaderboard, the physical extraction industry that makes their hardware possible has virtually vanished from the board.
Friedland’s message to the President was clear: You cannot rebuild the American industrial machine on a foundation that Wall Street values at pennies on the dollar.

