The Gerard Barron Pattern: Why a CEO Who Watched One Deep-Sea Mining Company Collapse Is Trying Again

Why would someone who watched one deep-sea mining company collapse go back and try it again? That's the question at the center of this episode, and it's not hypothetical. It happened, with the same industry, some of the same licenses, and the same person at the center of it: Gerard Barron, now CEO of The Metals Company (TMC), one of the most prominent and best-funded companies pushing to start commercial deep-sea mining today. This isn't framed as an accusation against Barron specifically. It's a documented sequence of decisions, and by the end, you can decide for yourself what the motive looks like.

Before TMC, Barron was an early investor and promoter behind Nautilus Minerals, a company that pursued seafloor mineral deposits off Papua New Guinea. Nautilus raised hundreds of millions of dollars, including investment from the PNG government itself, before its costs spiraled, it was delisted from the Toronto Stock Exchange, and it filed for bankruptcy in 2019. Barron reportedly sold his shares years before the collapse, walking away with a return as high as $30 million, while PNG's government and environment were left holding the damage. Years later, people connected to Nautilus, including Barron, regrouped as Deep Green, which became The Metals Company, and picked up exploration rights in the Clarion Clipperton Zone that had once belonged to Nautilus.

This episode traces that arc from Adstream to Nautilus to TMC, including TMC's push to trigger the ISA's two-year rule, its more recent pursuit of a US mining permit outside the International Seabed Authority process entirely, and Barron's consistent argument that mining the seabed is less environmentally damaging than mining on land. Whether that comparison holds up, and what it means that the environmental cost of Nautilus's failure barely factors into how Barron talks about it now, is the thread running through the whole story.

Takeaways

• Gerard Barron, now CEO of The Metals Company (TMC), was an early investor and promoter (not CEO) behind an earlier deep-sea mining venture, Nautilus Minerals, which went bankrupt in 2019.
• Nautilus's projected operating costs of about $70 per ton reportedly grew to about $192 per ton, contributing to its delisting from the Toronto Stock Exchange and eventual bankruptcy.
• Papua New Guinea's government invested in Nautilus and, according to the country's prime minister, the country spent roughly 300 million Kina (about $72 million USD) on a project later called a "total failure."
• Barron sold his Nautilus shares years before the company's collapse, reportedly for as much as $30 million, while PNG's government was still invested.
• TMC, which Barron now leads, is pursuing a US permitting path through NOAA and the Trump administration, outside the ISA process.
• Long-term recovery data on deep-sea mining damage remains limited; some studies cited in the episode indicate no biodiversity recovery three to four years after mining activity occurred.
• Barron has publicly compared seabed mining favorably to land-based mining, but a specific biomass figure he's cited in at least one interview is disputed in this episode as inaccurate.