Just when you thought 2025 couldn't get any weirder, Trump Media and Technology Group - best known for Truth Social - is jumping into the still-nascent but heavily funded nuclear fusion industry via a planned merger with TAE Technologies.
TMTG on Thursday announced a merger agreement with fusion power firm TAE Technologies that will see the pair combine under the Trump banner with an arguably impossibly ambitious goal of breaking ground on a utility-scale fusion power plant in 2026. The deal, which the pair said is an all-stock transaction valued at $6 billion, isn't even supposed to close until the middle of next year.
"Trump Media & Technology Group built uncancelable infrastructure to secure free expression online for Americans, and now we're taking a big step forward toward a revolutionary technology that will cement America's global energy dominance for generations," former congressman and TMTG chairman and CEO Devin Nunes said of the deal.
"Fusion power … will lower energy prices, boost supply, ensure America's A.I.-supremacy, revive our manufacturing base and bolster national defense," Nunes added.
Like other fusion bets, this hinges on whether TAE can turn lab experiments into a working power plant.
TAE has been chasing commercial fusion for roughly 27 years - nearly long enough for it to have existed for an entire cycle of the long-standing joke that fusion energy is always 30 years away.
The company is working on a fusion generator that uses an approach known as field-reversed configuration (FRC), which the company claims has the potential to be more efficient than the donut-shaped tokamak reactors being chased by many other fusion startups.
More efficiency in a system that has yet to actually function, we note, isn't exactly impressive.
TAE claimed in April that its latest machine, dubbed Norm, produced hot, stable FRC plasma with reduced machine complexity and 50 percent lower costs, but production of plasma isn't fusion ignition - just the first step in the process.
As of writing, only one fusion facility has publicly reported achieving "ignition," meaning the fusion fuel released more energy than the laser energy delivered to the target. That milestone was reached at the US government-funded National Ignition Facility (NIF), which drew on scientists from multiple national laboratories and was first announced in December 2022.
While impressive, the NIF result still wasn't net positive in any practical sense: the facility consumed hundreds of megajoules of electrical energy to power the lasers, which delivered about 2 megajoules to the target and produced a fusion yield of roughly 3.15 megajoules.
According to TAE, it was planning a sixth-generation machine, Copernicus, "to demonstrate the viability of net energy generation … before the end of the decade," but the company scrapped its plan for that machine in November, instead accelerating its plan to build Da Vinci, a prototype power plant, while skipping a critical demonstration phase.
Still, there’s no indication TAE has done anything besides produce and study high-temperature plasma in experimental devices - a far cry from being ready to move on to the utility-scale fusion power plant the combined company says it intends to site and begin constructing in 2026.
The far more realistic reason for a merger between the company behind Truth Social and a Google-backed fusion energy company that claims to have pulled down $1.2 billion in private capital funding is a simple one: Money.
Trump Media and Technology Group, which was announced in October 2021 and jumped to nearly $100 a share shortly after, has been on a generally downward trajectory ever since, with only a brief spike in 2024 to offset continued losses. The company hit all-time lows in November when it dipped to just $10.29 a share, where it's been hovering ever since. But hey, wouldn't you know it? That fusion deal has seen it skyrocket to $14 as of writing, a 35 percent gain over the past month.
Billions of dollars have been pouring into the fusion energy industry since the NIF achieved ignition in 2022, MIT noted earlier this month, making it the perfect gamble for a struggling social media company and a fusion firm that needs a new cash injection.
Nuno Loureiro, the late director of MIT's Plasma Science and Fusion Center and a leading fusion researcher before his alleged murder this week, said in early December that the commercial viability of fusion energy within the next decade is still an "open question," but one that fusion companies are racing against each other to get enough funding for.
"This is a very advanced technology, and whatever nation masters it first is going to have an incredible advantage," Loureiro said. "There is a moonshot opportunity here, a version of the Apollo program. But you cannot fund a disruptive technology with non-disruptive levels of money."
The NIF cost around $3.5 billion to construct and commission - and that's before all the money spent to fuel, operate, and staff it, bringing the total cost of the facility to at least $13.5 billion.
In other words, Trump Fusion probably has a long way to go, if it ever gets there, but that likely won't stop the money from rolling in to what TMTG said will be "one of the world's first publicly traded fusion companies."
Neither TAE nor TMTG responded to questions for this story. ®
Source: The register