Inside Trump Media’s head-scratching $6 billion merger to become a nuclear fusion company

In what is almost certainly the oddest merger of the year, President Donald Trump’s social media company struck a $6 billion deal to unite with the fusion energy company TAE Technologies in a bid to start building the “world’s first utility-scale fusion power plant” next year. 

The all-stock deal will create the first publicly traded fusion company, vaulting privately held TAE — the onetime darling of investors pumping billions into the so-called holy grail of clean energy — ahead of its rivals in accessing financing from retail traders. 

Upon closing, shareholders in Trump Media & Technology Group, the parent company of Truth Social, will own approximately 50% of the combined firm. The company’s stock price skyrocketed nearly 35% on news of the merger Thursday. 

“Trump Media and Technology Group has built uncancelable infrastructure to secure free expression online for Americans, and now we’re taking a big step toward a revolutionary technology that will cement America’s global energy dominance for generations,” Devin Nunes, who serves as Trump Media’s chairman and chief executive, said on a call with analysts Thursday morning. “Fusion power will be the most dramatic energy breakthrough since the onset of commercial nuclear energy in the 1950s.”

Fusion vs. fission

Unlike nuclear fission, which involves harvesting the energy released when atoms split in two, fusion generates heat and pressure from two atomic nuclei forcibly joining into one. It’s the kind of reaction that powers the sun. Fusion does not generate the same types or volumes of long-lived radioactive byproducts in the form of waste, and the materials needed to fuel fusion are more abundant than the uranium used in traditional nuclear reactors. Researchers have pined for decades to harness fusion — to create, in essence, a controlled artificial star. But the technological challenges have been so steep, fusion has long been mocked as the energy source of tomorrow that always will be.

The vast majority of the funding that went toward researching fusion came from governments and focused on megaprojects like the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, a highly complex facility in southern France that’s been under construction for more than a decade. 

That all changed in December 2022, when federal scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory made history by generating more energy from a fusion reaction than it took to spark. The program was focused on producing weapons, not civilian energy. But the breakthrough inspired venture capitalists to pump billions of dollars into more than two dozen startups in the US alone. 

The players pursuing fusion

Several companies are already working on building their first plants. In July, Microsoft-backed Helion started construction on its facility in Washington state, vowing to produce the first commercial electrons by 2028. So ambitious was that target date that the Fusion Industries Association, a trade group that Helion was a founding member of, cast doubt over its feasibility in a podcast weeks later. Commonwealth Fusion Systems, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology spin-off that in recent years supplanted TAE as the biggest magnet for private capital, expects its first commercial plant in Virginia to come online sometime in the 2030s. 

Investors swung toward Commonwealth Fusion because it’s pursuing the best-understood and most straightforward technological approach, analysts say, relying on a hydrogen fuel made up of the isotopes deuterium and tritium that need to be heated to roughly 100 million degrees Celsius, nearly 7x hotter than the sun. By contrast, TAE’s design requires deuterium and boron, which needs to reach nearly 1 billion degrees Celsius. 

“TAE is not following the easiest pathway; it’s a very challenging and complex approach,” Chris Gadomski, the lead nuclear analyst at consultancy BloombergNEF, told Sherwood News. “TAE is swinging for the fences for a grand slam, whereas Commonwealth is taking the most developed technology that’s best understood and trying to get a single and move that way, which is perhaps the easiest way to go.” 

Even with the recent progress, some experts believe fusion is still decades away. Nearly three-quarters of the funding governments around the world have invested in fusion has gone to what’s called magnetic fusion, involving doughnut-shaped reactors called tokamaks. But the Lawrence Livermore breakthrough came from inertial fusion, which involves blasting a fuel pellet with high-powered lasers. 

“All fusion startups claim that they’re going to put fusion electricity on the grid in the early 2030s,” Daniel Jassby, the retired research physicist who spent years leading the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, said back in 2022. “They have no justification for saying that — there’s no way that’s going to happen.”

The technological challenges aside, the fusion industry faces serious supply chain bottlenecks, according to a report the University of Pennsylvania’s Kleinman Center for Energy Policy published in October.

“Fusion economics will also be limited by the ability of new supply chains to sustain private-sector growth,” the analysis concluded. “The fusion industry will require specialized components that don’t yet have well-established supply chains.”

Among that equipment: superconducting cables that use advanced materials and high-powered lasers. 

But investment is picking up. In the 12 months leading up to this past July, fusion drew $2.5 billion in public and private dollars, data from the Fusion Industry Association shows.

The US Department of Energy just gave fusion its own office for the first time in last month’s internal reorganization. China, meanwhile, went from spending nothing on fusion in 2021 to investing more than the rest of the world combined in 2025. The $2.1 billion the Chinese government and private investors put into a new state-owned fusion company this summer, The New York Times noted in a feature last week, is roughly 2.5x the Energy Department’s annual fusion budget. 

The nuclear industry has recently attracted billions more from retail investors who want in on the game. While the US has yet to build a next-generation fission plant — the kind of reactor that uses coolants other than water — the value of publicly traded startups with no revenue, such as Oklo, have ballooned as high as $25 billion recently. 

Likewise, TAE’s technology is “something like the second or third generation of fusion power,” Gadomski said. 

“If they’re successful in doing it, it could be very, very successful,” he said. “But good luck on this one.”

Alexander C. Kaufman is an award-winning journalist whose work has appeared in The Atlantic, Heatmap, Canary Media, and HuffPost, and who writes the Field Notes newsletter.