President Donald Trump’s failing social media tech bid has tirelessly tried to reinvent itself into a viable business.
But despite forays into cryptocurrency, prediction markets, and a Roku streaming app that few have heard of, the Trump Media and Technology Group (TMTG) is still losing a staggering amount of money.
The company, which owns Trump’s online megaphone Truth Social and is being run by his eldest son Donald Trump Jr., reported a quarterly loss of $54.8 million at the end of September.
Now, in its latest eyebrow-raising pivot, the company announced this week that it’s merging with the fusion power company TAE, formerly called Tri Alpha Energy.
It’s yet another peculiar detour for the troubled and massively unprofitable company, which started as a comparatively simple competitor to Twitter after it permanently suspended Trump from its platform in 2021. The firm subsequently merged with a blank-check acquisition company in March 2024, allowing it to be publicly traded.
The fusion news was met with plenty of investor enthusiasm, sending the company’s stock — under the ticker DJT — soaring by over 35 percent at the time of writing.
The company’s latest business foray is a serious long shot. Despite decades of research — and enormous interest from the private sector — scientists are only beginning to crack the point where highly complex fusion reactors, designed to harness the energy of fusing atoms, can generate more energy than they require to operate.
While it’s already being lauded as a technological revolution by many, promising an infinite source of clean and safe energy, plenty of questions remain about the tech’s feasibility, particularly when it comes to scaling up operations.
In today’s announcement, TMTG claimed that TAE has “significantly reduced fusion reactor size, cost, and complexity” and “built and safely operated five fusion reactors and raised more than $1.3 billion in private capital to date,” from heavyweights like Google, Chevron, and Goldman Sachs.
TMTG’s announcement could also put Trump at odds with a growing number of competitors in an increasingly busy space. For instance, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has made considerable investments in a nuclear fusion startup called Helion. Amazon cofounder Jeff Bezos is also funneling money into fusion energy companies.
Billionaire Elon Musk, however, is not interested, calling it an outright stupid idea. In a tweet posted just days before TMTG announced the TAE deal, Musk — who’s feuded bitterly with Trump in an on-again-off-again friendship — argued that the “Sun is an enormous, free fusion reactor in the sky.”
“It is super dumb to make tiny fusion reactors on Earth,” he added. “Stop wasting money on puny little reactors, unless actively acknowledging that they are just there for your pet science project jfc.”
TMTG’s leadership, however, are adamant that it’s a sound idea.
“Fusion power will be the most dramatic energy breakthrough since the onset of commercial nuclear energy in the 1950s,” CEO Devin Nunes said in the announcement.
Nunes also implied that investing in fusion now could benefit from the enormous amount of interest in artificial intelligence.
“Fusion power will lower energy prices, bolster our national defense, and secure the energy needed to guarantee America’s dominance of AI technology,’ he The timing of the announcement is certainly intriguing. Mere days ago, Nuno Loureiro, a lauded theoretical physicist and director of the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center, was murdered in his home in Brookline, Massachusetts.
More on fusion: MIT Fusion Physicist Murdered in His Home
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