, Columnist
Battery Billionaire Needs More Juice
Bollore's tech has promise, but a partner would help.
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Vincent Bollore is infamous for his corporate raids and boardroom coups. Yet the Breton billionaire has a less bellicose side hustle: he's spent more than a decade developing electric batteries for cars and buses, as well as energy storage systems.
Financially, he hasn't got much to show for it. More than 2 billion euros ($2.25 billion) has been spent and no profit generated. The technology it's using, known as a solid-state battery, is promising: experts see it as a successor to today's lithium ion batteries. But family-controlled Bollore SA has chosen to go it alone, which might doom its own product to irrelevance.