A planned $6 billion merger between President Donald Trump’s social media and cryptocurrency company and a fusion power firm may give a boost to efforts to innovate a new form of electricity but raises thorny questions about what the energy company has to gain, economists and ethics experts said.
The companies say the merger is motivated by the Trump firm’s ready access to crucial capital that its new partner, California-based TAE Technologies, can tap in its race to build a fusion power plant. As part of the deal, Trump’s firm will initially invest as much as $300 million in the fusion technology.
Economist Peter Schiff sees another motive: “The only real value DJT offers an energy company is political leverage: access to power and the prospect of favorable treatment from the Trump administration,” Schiff, chief economist at Euro Pacific Asset Management, posted on the social media platform X. “With this merger, it is now obviously well positioned to monetize that access.”
DJT is the stock ticker for Trump’s firm, Trump Media and Technology Group.
Other analysts have raised the same red flag, saying any fusion company will need the support of the federal government to bring this nascent, unproven and extremely costly technology out of the laboratories and onto the power grid.
The White House denied any conflict exists.
“The media’s continued attempts to fabricate conflicts of interest are irresponsible and reinforce the public’s distrust in what they read,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in an email. “Neither the President nor his family have ever engaged, or will ever engage, in conflicts of interest.”
Trump Media responded to questions about the value it brings to the deal by accusing The Washington Post of pursuing a “Pavlovian hit piece.”
Federal conflict of interest laws prohibit most federal officials from having this kind of financial stake in a company they regulate, but the president and lawmakers are exempt from those rules, said Richard Painter, who was the chief ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush.
The unusual arrangement combines a politically connected media firm with little experience in energy development with a physicist-run private company seeking to innovate a form of emissions-free power that scientists have been trying to develop for decades.
TAE says Trump Media’s cash infusion will help it get past the significant barriers ahead of it in the quest to build utility scale fusion power plants that would fuel the U.S. data center boom. TAE is one of several private firms that has been trying to innovate the power source. The companies are in a high stakes and costly race, and it remains uncertain if they will be able to build technology that makes fusion into a viable electricity source anytime soon.
The timeline TAE and Trump Media announced is extremely aggressive, with plant construction getting underway as soon as next year and electricity being generated by 2031. Many scientists and energy industry executives are skeptical that fusion power could provide a significant amount of electricity in the United States by then — if ever.
And even if plants do get built, it is unclear whether fusion power would ever be affordable.
Fusion power is generated by squeezing atoms together to mimic the nuclear reaction that fuels the sun. It has the potential to generate limitless, emissions-free energy. But sustaining that reaction for a prolonged period comes at a tremendous cost and could require materials that have not yet even been invented.
It is possible a few commercial facilities get built and then the entire effort is abandoned because the power costs too much to make, some scientists have warned.
But the deal, announced Thursday morning, immediately catapults TAE to the front of the pack of companies in this race, enabling it to tap not just the capital of Trump’s company but the political influence that comes with the alliance. Fusion firms are working in tandem with federal government labs to create the new power source, and they will be subjected to a rigorous approval process before plants can come online, industry officials say. Early fusion power plants may also require significant government subsidies.
Other energy firms with connections to the Trump administration have seen their fortunes rise in recent months.
“Fusion is a great idea, but we should have competing companies that succeed on the merits and not because they have a friend in the White House,” Painter said. “This is not a good trend, and it is unique to this White House. We have not seen any other presidents getting this close to an industry and taking big equity stakes like this.”
Howie Forman, a professor of public health, management and economics at Yale University, called the deal an extraordinary “grift” in a post on X. “Laws will be written to prevent this from ever happening again,” he wrote.
The combined company will be jointly run by Trump Media CEO Devin Nunes and TAE chief executive Michl Binderbauer. Donald Trump Jr. will sit on the board. The initial plant it intends to build would generate 50 megawatts of power, a relatively modest amount at a time artificial intelligence data center campuses can use 20 times that amount of energy or more.
The companies say they plan to eventually build plants that generate 350 to 500 megawatts “to provide economic, abundant, and dependable electricity that would help America win the A.I. revolution and maintain its global dominance.”
TAE, founded in 1998, is one of the oldest commercial fusion ventures in the United States. Its investors include Google parent Alphabet, Chevron and Goldman Sachs.
The U.S. right now is in a competition with China to bring fusion electricity to power grids. Both nations are investing billions in this energy source.
“Fusion power will be the most dramatic energy breakthrough since the onset of commercial nuclear energy in the 1950s,” Nunes said. “This deal will create America’s first publicly traded fusion power company.”
Binderbauer said the companies are “excited to identify our first site and begin deploying this revolutionary technology.”
Founded in 2021 after Trump was banned from social media platforms in the aftermath of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, Trump Media & Technology Group and its social network, Truth Social, billed itself as a right-wing Big Tech alternative that would be “resilient to cancel culture.”
The platform has gained a niche following among MAGA users, led by Trump himself, who posts to the platform in rapid fire, sometimes more than 100 times a day.
The public company is majority owned by Trump’s revocable trust, which is overseen by his adult sons. Its stock climbed after the news by about 33 percent, to roughly $13, but is still down about 60 percent for the year.
The company, however, has struggled to stand out from other far larger social media companies and build a conventionally sustainable business. Trump Media said in SEC filings that it lost $400 million last year and that its annual revenue had fallen 12 percent, to roughly $3.6 million, about as much as a single McDonald’s restaurant franchise.
The company has in recent months said it was pivoting into a number of different businesses, including video streaming (Truth+), financial technology (Truth. Fi) and prediction markets, through a deal with Crypto.com. It also unveiled an AI chat tool, Truth Search AI, that offered answers to users’ questions, some of which contradicted the president himself.
None of the ventures, before Thursday, were in energy. Trump Media sued The Post for defamation in 2023, saying the news organization had reported incorrectly on allegations concerning its financing. The case is ongoing.
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