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.

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.

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.

TAE’s design requires deuterium and boron that needs to reach nearly 1 billion degrees Celsius. That is a more difficult proposition than even other fusion companies like Commonwealth Fusion Systems are aiming for, like heating deuterium and tritium to roughly 100 million 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. “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.”

The Takeaway

TAE is not alone. In July, Microsoft-backed Helion started construction on its facility in Washington state, vowing to produce the first commercial electrons by 2028. Commonwealth Fusion, 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.

Investment is picking up: in the 12 months leading up to this past July, fusion drew $2.5 billion in public and private dollars, according to the Fusion Industry Association’s data.

Make it even more suspicious that the MIT professor got murdered hours before this deal was announced