A few years from now, a few investors on here may be asked by...

A few years from now, a few investors on here may be asked by their grandkids How did they make their millions? They will be able to say "It all started when a man cook up some clay in a casserole dish."

The refinery? His family’s slow cooker. Normally tasked with brewing delicious casseroles, the ceramic pot was stuffed by the end.

But not before the geologist-cum-not-so-mad scientist produced alumina salt with a purity of 99.8%.

“The literature says this should leach at 90 degrees, it’s not boiling, it’s corrosive of chemicals, obviously, but wear a couple rubber gloves and some eyeglasses and I could do it at home,” Gotthard said.

“So I just got the slow cooker out of the kitchen, my wife’s like, ‘what the hell are you doing?’ I filtered it all off, did some reactions and created the 99.8% purity salt in my own kitchen.”