A number of people have claimed to be able to economically recover gold from sea water, but so far they have all been either mistaken or acted in an intentional deception. A so-called reverend, Prescott Jernegan ran a gold-from-seawater swindle in the United States in the 1890s. A British fraudster ran the same scam in England in the early 1900s.[51] Fritz Haber (the German inventor of the Haber process) did research on the extraction of gold from sea water in an effort to help pay Germany's reparations following World War I.[52] Based on the published values of 2 to 64 ppb of gold in seawater a commercially successful extraction seemed possible. After analysis of 4,000 water samples yielding an average of 0.004 ppb it became clear that the extraction would not be possible and he stopped the project.[53] No commercially viable mechanism for performing gold extraction from sea water has yet been identified. Gold synthesis is not economically viable and is unlikely to become so in the foreseeable future.
His invention works off the "Coriolis effect". His problem on the Shark Tank was that he's not a pitch man and it sounded like snake oil he was offering. He also failed to mention that there are two other profit creating waste products, salt and manganese.
LOL. I think they missed the oportunity of a life time.
If I were them, I would give him all the money, but would require a condition. Before we sign the contract I get a team a physicist explain if that's possible.
The implied value gain of that deal is tremendous. 99% the guy is a nutjob, but no matter how small the chance of his idea being legit, it is still worth pursuing. They should had went ahead and checked his credential(those awards, check with his professors and mentors) and checked with other physicists before refusing the deal.