(Bloomberg) -- Natural gas tycoon Charif Souki says the retail investors he aims to reach with a series of YouTube videos are “extremely important and extremely sophisticated.”

Souki, the chairman and founder of Tellurian Inc., said in a Bloomberg Television interview on Wednesday that the company realized in March of last year it had about 40,000 retail shareholders and needed a way to communicate with them effectively. Houston-based Tellurian is trying to line up financial backers to build a $15.5 billion liquefied natural gas export terminal in Louisiana.

Though Tellurian’s video messages to retail investors are simple and frequent, “this notion that they don’t know what they are doing and what they are talking about is wrong. With a phone today, you can do more analysis than I was able to do when I was beginning my career on Wall Street,” Souki said. The company’s shares have tripled this year.

Souki has said Tellurian plans to line up financing for the Driftwood LNG export project by the end of the year. The project will require a “significant component” of equity, which could come in the form of cash or gas-producing assets, he said in the Bloomberg TV interview. But the premium for gas in Asia and Europe over U.S. prices makes the project economic, he said.

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