AP Photo/Butch Dill
Trump Media & Technology Group, the parent company of President Donald Trump’s Truth Social platform, announced a merger Thursday with TAE Technologies, a nuclear fusion power company.
According to a report by The New York Times, the deal entails an all-stock deal “valued at more than $6 billion” between TMTG and TAE, which was founded in 1998.
TMTG had already expanded its activities from social media into cryptocurrency and a streaming deal with conservative network Newsmax. This new partnership would be its first foray into nuclear fusion, a still unproven experimental energy technology, and would be one of the first publicly traded nuclear fusion companies in the world, according to a press release about the merger.
Thus far, Truth Social has struggled in the competitive social media market, mostly serving as the president’s platform of choice, but his posts get swiftly reposted to other platforms and other major influencers — even among the MAGA faithful — have been slow to adopt Truth Social as a priority platform and TMTG has lost hundreds of millions of dollars.
Trump is TMTG’s largest shareholder. His stake was once worth more than $4 billion but has since dropped to about $1 billion, and is held in a trust managed by Donald Trump Jr., who is also a board member of the company. Former Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) serves as TMTG’s CEO, and FBI Director Kash Patel and Secretary of Education Linda McMahon are also board members.
The merger announcement sent TMTG shares soaring 35 percent in early trading Thursday, cooling off slightly from a peak price of $14.34 in the late morning.
Screenshot via Google.
A major factor in the interest in nuclear fusion is its potential as a clean-energy source for the ravenous power needs of AI data centers, the Times report noted, but the involvement of the president’s own company into a highly competitive sphere is once again raising concerns about conflicts of interest and other ethical issues.
Nuclear fusion energy “is a long-elusive dream,” reported the Times, because it “uses fuels that are abundant, eliminates the risk of meltdowns and produces no long-term radioactive waste,” and has the potential to “produce power that is free of carbon emissions and available around the clock.” Still, it’s an “enormously complicated to initiate and control, and developing machines that can do it consistently and affordably enough to power a grid could require technological advancements that have yet to be made, and perhaps even materials that have yet to be invented.”
CNN’s report on the merger noted that successful nuclear fusion was “likely still years, or even decades, away.”
The merger will have to be approved by TMTG shareholders and get basic clearance from the Securities and Exchange Commission (headed by chair Paul Atkins, appointed by Trump earlier this year). If the merger goes through, shareholders of the two companies would each own about 50 percent of the combined company, the press release announcement said, and Nunes and Michl Bienderbauer, TAE’s CEO, would be co-CEOs of the new entity. Trump Jr. will remain on the board as well.
