Imagine the board meetings. The success of President Donald Trump’s “non-woke” social media network will now be measured alongside a fusion energy company’s own progress toward a scientific breakthrough with its hydrogen-boron approach.
Trump Media & Technology, the parent company of Truth Social, on Thursday announced a merger with TAE Technologies, Inc., a leader in fusion technology that’s backed by investors including Google, Chevron, and Goldman Sachs. The deal, valued at $6 billion, creates the first publicly traded fusion company.
It managed to surprise the market, a rarity during a Trump presidency whose political brand has been built on shock value. The media company’s unlikely entry into fusion is ostensibly a bid to capitalize on the artificial intelligence boom and its skyrocketing power demands, which have pushed both investors and startups into a race for new sources of firm power. Fusion — which relies on a still unproven technology and has yet to be commercialized — could be transformative as a carbon-free, nearly limitless source of baseload power.
Devin Nunes, a Trump loyalist who left Congress to be CEO of Trump Media in 2022, said in a statement that fusion power will be “the most dramatic energy breakthrough” since nuclear energy in the 1950s and ensure the country’s AI supremacy, a major Trump priority. Since January, the administration has issued a flurry of executive orders aimed at beating China at the AI race, such as directing federal agencies to speed up permits for data center construction and preempting state laws regulating AI.
The fine print
Nunes will be co-CEO of the combined company with Michl Binderbauer, an Austrian-American physicist and the co-founder of TAE, who according to the TMTG investor presentation holds more than 100 patents.
TAE, formerly a privately owned company, said its next-generation fusion technology is ready for commercialization after more than two decades of research and development that reduced the size, cost, and complexity of its fusion reactor. That said, the effort is both technologically uncertain and depends on enormous capital, as Binderbauer highlighted in his LinkedIn post about the deal. And that’s where Trump Media comes in. “By merging our world-leading science with TMTG’s access to significant capital, we are preparing to soon site a location and begin construction on the world’s first utility-scale fusion power plant, subject to required approvals,” Binderbauer wrote.
Trump Media is considered a “meme stock” by market analysts because stock ownership is largely driven by the president’s supporters, not its financial health.
The company earned $2.7 million in revenue during the first nine months of 2025, but lost nearly $107 million, according to its latest SEC filing. That’s an improvement over last year, however; it lost $400 million in 2024. That said, Trump Media’s market capitalization is high: $2.9 billion, due to cash raised in an initial stock offering and significant Bitcoin assets.
Trump Media plans to provide $200 million in cash to TAE at the deal’s closing, the company said, which is expected in mid-2026.
Fusion remains far off
Despite the advances in fusion power in recent years, the technology is still unproven. A joke among skeptics is that fusion “is thirty years away, and will always be thirty years away”; many scientists predict the mid-2030s is the most realistic timeline for fusion power to enter the grid.
The goal of fusion is to harness the nuclear reactions that powers the sun to create clean, nearly limitless energy in power plants on Earth. Scientists have been working on this for decades, but historically the process uses more energy than it produces.
A breakthrough arrived in 2022, when the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory managed, for the first time, to break even on energy for fusion ignition. That program cost billions of dollars, and took decades to reach so-called “ignition.”
No company has taken things the necessary step further and managed to create a reaction that produces more energy than it consumes — a prerequisite to commercialized fusion. Many are trying, including TAE, Helion Energy (which has a power purchase agreement with Microsoft), and Commonwealth Fusion Systems.
The latter is considered the richest fusion startup in the world, having raised over $2 billion to date. CFS in September signed a PPA with the Italian energy giant Eni for a planned fusion plant in Chesterfield County, Virginia. The agreement is worth more than $1 billion, though the specific financial terms weren’t being made public.
The details of Trump Media-TAE’s project were sparse as well. The combined company said it plans to site and start construction of the world’s first utility-scale fusion power plant (50 megawatts) in 2026 — assuming it can secure approvals — and eventually scale up to 500 MW plants.
