If you're like me and sitting on a more than a few very unattractive lithium equities, this one deserves your attention: the Rio Tinto boss just gave his assessment of when the lithium price might rise again.

You only need to tune into a Boom, Doom, Zoom broadcast on the Switzer Report (live every Thursday at midday for subscribers!) to hear punters ask Peter Switzer and Paul Rickard a question about lithium stocks. I would bet the money in my pocket right now that we get one in today's session, even.

Switzer and Rickard typically end on the same point each time: lithium is probably the right commodity at the wrong time. Sure, it's in everyone's cars, phones and home batteries right now, but supply massively outstrips demand right now.

More and more electric car brands, for example, continue to pile into Australia. Just last night I was at an event with MG and IM where they announced two incredibly compelling electric vehicles set to hit the roads soon, full of bells and whistles at a low-price set to stun.

Despite the increase in lithium-powered products rolling onto our shores, lithium prices are a shade of what they used to be. To put it into perspective, a glut of lithium supply tanked the market back in 2022, as prices crashed from almost $130,000 per tonne in October 2022, down to a crushing $15,787 at the time of writing. The teachings of Switzer and Rickard reveal that those with literally years of patience may eventually see some return on their investment. But not everyone has that kind of patience.

Rio Tinto boss Jakub Stausholm might have it, however.

Earlier in the year, almost in tandem, Rio announced this year that it would spend $10.7 billion to acquire Arcadium Lithium. Then there was a $2.5 billion investment in the Argentina-baed Rincon project. That Rincon announcement on its own would see Rio produce 60,000 tonnes of the stuff per year by the time it's finished. Add that to what gets produced by the seven different mines and refineries across the globe under Arcadia's control and you can start to get an idea of how confident Stausholm is in lithium.

So why is he so confident? And when does he expect this stuff to actually be worth something again? That's what investors were asking yesterday as the Danish exec fronted investors to announce the mining giant's lowest profit in five years. The bad medicine continued as he announced a slashing of the dividend at the same time.

When asked by investors when his company's lithium bets might pay off, Stausholm tipped his hand:

"What matters for us is what is the lithium price five years from now. All the fundamentals are telling us that our bet into lithium is exactly rightly timed and will develop into an amazing business in years to come,” he said.

“Look at the fundamentals, the demand is there, the energy transition is happening. But not next quarter, we are talking three or five years down the road.”

If he's right, and lithium does pay off in five years' time, Stausholm could be the commodity-prophet of our time. And to be honest, he's been saying it from the beginning.

When announcing the Rincon expansion, Stausholm described his game of four-dimensional, multi-year market chess by describing it as a "long-term" investment that would set Rio up for big games when lithium finally hits.

"We are dedicated to developing tissue tier one resource at the low-end of the cost curve," he said.

So Stausholm is betting that, by the time the Argentinian project is fully viable and pumping our battery metals by the literal truckload, the stuff will be worth far more than it was when the mine broke ground.

Whether investors have that kind of patience, however, remains to be seen. Especially after hearing the kind of questions the now-outgoing Rio CEO fielded at yesterday's tricky earnings event.