[steve-benjamins]

Congo produces 2/3rds of the worlds Cobalt. It really doesn't matter if Apple, Microsoft, Dell, Tesla and Google admit they used child labour.... They have.

Instead of levelling skepticism at the lawsuit, why not level skepticism at the companies with a collective market cap of ~$2 trillion? Doesn't that seem more constructive?

There's a real failure of imagination in these comments. Working conditions can and have been improved by advocacy. Saying child labour is an inevitable outcome of capitalism is the same argument that was made by slave owners in the south and Industrialists in Britain at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. You're wrong.

[samatman]

30% of 2016's cobalt consumption is 34800 tonnes. Most cobalt is used in alloys[0], and it is mathematically impossible that each of five companies uses more than a third of the supply in any case.

In other words, it's quite possible that any, or even all, of those companies don't use DRC cobalt. I'll grant you that it's unlikely, particularly in Tesla's case, given how many batteries they produce.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt#Applications