Why Is Trump's Truth Social Merging With a Nuclear Fusion Company?

The answer, of course, is grift. The answer is always grift.

On Thursday, Trump Media & Technology Group announced a merger with TAE Technologies — the former is the parent company of niche social media platform Truth Social, known primarily as the place an inexplicably powerful elderly man shouts in all-caps that he has ordered the Space Force to commandeer the Nostromo and use it to annihilate Slovenia, Thank You For Your Attention To This Matter; the latter is a decades-old nuclear fusion company that, like every other nuclear fusion company, has yet to deliver any actual nuclear fusion power.

The deal would create a new publicly traded company — TAE was private, Trump Media public — valued at $6 billion. What a failing but politically relevant social media (and yes, crypto, of course, among other things) company can offer to a fusion company is simply cash: TAE gets at least $300 million for its operations in the deal. "We’ve got the tools and the tech and the engineering," Michl Binderbauer, TAE's CEO, told the New York Times. "What we were lacking was the capital."

While $300 million is no small amount, that's still a bit rich: according to the most recent Fusion Industry Association report, TAE is among only three companies (of more than 50 in the space now) that have raised over $1 billion in capital, totaling $1.3 billion as of earlier this year. They claim that their 27 years and $1.3 billion has built and safely operated "five fusion reactors" — but by reactor they mean prototype, and by operated they mean "did not generate more power than they require to run."

But okay, fine, maybe just a bit of extra cash will put them over the line — the line that has been receding, cartoon-like, just over the next horizon, again and again, for 75 years or so. TAE has actually been less bold with its timeline predictions than some others over the years, but the splashy merger announcement clearly required, well, some splash: the new TAE-Trump Media group says they will begin construction on "the world's first utility-scale fusion power plant" in the year that starts in, uh, two weeks.

They join Helion Energy, another older fusion company that has been more brazen with its goalpost-moving shenanigans, in the under-construction phase. Helion said they broke ground on an actual plant in July of this year, and claim to be on track to deliver power as part of an agreement with Microsoft in 2028. Place your bets.

It should be noted again: None of these companies have demonstrated the technology to actually deliver power from their theoretical power plants. They have moved the chains forward incrementally over the years, and academic fusion efforts have produced an ostensible "break-even" (though not really), and they continue to insist as an industry that commercialization is just around the corner — because that's what you need to say to get venture capitalists to keep giving you money. In the last couple of years, they have started to attract actual customers, with power purchase agreements for entirely theoretical power with Amazon, Google, and others.

TAE's breakthrough here is that instead of pounding the Silicon Valley pavement over and over they can turn to the griftiest grifters of them all and take a shortcut — not to mention grab the inside position on potential government approvals, permits, and so on, while incentivizing the administration to hold every competitor up.

Trump, meanwhile, juices a largely failing company: the president is the largest stock owner of Trump Media & Technology Group (though theoretically held in a trust run by... Donald Trump Jr.), and hey look, after the stock price fell from highs in the $40s in January all the way to around $10 yesterday, it leapt by 42 percent just today after the announcement. The president owns $1 billion or so of the stuff.

As always, the White House wants you to stop worrying about all that. As press secretary Karoline Leavitt told the Washington Post today: "Neither the President nor his family have ever engaged, or will ever engage, in conflicts of interest." Whew, incredible stuff. This administration, the fusion industry — there's a chance they deserve each other.