I was under the impression that the point of asteroid mining was to build stuff in space using material already in space.

Mineral processing is one of the most resource intensive processes known to man. The amount of water and equipment required for communition alone is nuts, and facilitating that process, along with many others, in space will remain infeasible for close to a century - at least. Never mind the transportation of the asteroids, or the post ore-sorting manufacturing that would supposedly take place in space.

But getting those base metals up into space is astronomically expensive on the other hand.

Always is a long time. If humanity survives, there's no way we don't end up gathering extra-planetary resources.

I don't think its necessarily a far-fetched idea. I just thought the venture might be extremely difficult when the company didn't have the means to actually get mining equipment to space, and even if they had the money to buy a space on a Boeing, SpaceX, or Blue Origin rocket, whats to stop anyone of those companies from monopolizing the asteroid mining market in the first place?

Hopefully it was real cents on the dollar, rather than BazingaCoin(tm).

"real"