IPO Backed By Former Texas Governor, Energy Secretary Mints Three Billionaires

Plenty of billionaires have been created by the artificial intelligence and data center booms—and now, the real estate underneath the data centers is generating ten-figure fortunes, too.

At least three new billionaires joined the three-comma club on Wednesday after Fermi America, an Amarillo, Texas-based real estate investment trust cofounded by former energy secretary and Texas governor Rick Perry, went public on the Nasdaq. The stock opened at $21 and closed 55% higher at $32.53 per share, valuing the nine-month-old firm at $19 billion, despite the fact that it has yet to generate any sales.

The biggest winner is Toby Neugebauer, 54, the firm’s president and CEO and one of three cofounders alongside Perry and his son, Griffin Perry. The son of former Texas congressman Randy Neugebauer, he and his family own an estimated 28% stake worth $6 billion as of market close on Wednesday—based on an analysis of a prospectus filed on October 1. A large chunk of that stake is held in trusts for his wife and two children.

Griffin Perry, 42, is the next largest shareholder, with an estimated 11% stake, worth $2.3 billion. Unlike his father, who serves as a director at the firm, the younger Perry doesn’t have a formal role at Fermi. Steven Meisel, 40, an investor in the company through his firm Pencross Energy, is worth $1.8 billion. Rick Perry himself, while not quite a billionaire, owns a stake worth some $540 million. In 2019, Forbes estimated then-energy secretary Perry’s net worth at just $3 million. A spokesperson for Fermi declined to comment.

Fermi, founded in January, hasn’t made a dime—in fact, it lost $6.4 million over its first six months of existence. That’s not surprising given that it doesn’t have any customers yet. In its prospectus, it stated it was “actively targeting” potential clients but didn’t name any of them, instead citing Musk’s xAI, OpenAI and Anthropic as “potential hyperscaler tenants.” The firm claims it signed a letter of intent in September for its first gigawatt of power with an unnamed “investment grade tenant” and pointed to recent data center leasing transactions in the market to estimate that it could generate $1.5 billion in revenues from a lease for 1 gigawatt of capacity. Still, it called these “illustrative returns” rather than projections of its future revenue.

The upstart will have to battle it out with more established data center operators, including giants like Coreweave, which counts among its customers blue-chip firms such as Microsoft, Meta and OpenAI. Coreweave’s stock has more than tripled since the firm went public in March, minting five billionaires and valuing the company at $60 billion.

But investors apparently like Fermi’s business plan, which is centered on a 5,236-acre Amarillo, Texas site called “Project Matador” on which the company aims to eventually deliver as much as 11 gigawatts of energy from natural gas, nuclear and solar plants. Fermi claims it can bring 1.1 gigawatts of that online by the end of 2026 in conjunction with the local utility. All that power will theoretically flow to as-of-yet-undetermined data centers on the same site.

“We believe this rapid power delivery timeline is a critical differentiator that will allow Fermi to attract tenants that require near-term access to large-scale, reliable energy to power their AI data center compute needs,” the prospectus reads. Fermi holds a 99-year lease to the land, which is owned by Texas Tech University.

While Fermi aims to power much of the center with nuclear energy, as well as some solar, it will initially rely on natural gas—similar to other enormous data centers like Elon Musk’s xAI “Colossus” in Memphis, Tennessee. In September, Fermi signed a letter of intent with Siemens Energy to purchase three gas turbines to generate 1.1 gigawatts for the site.

The deal also calls for Fermi and Siemens to collaborate on nuclear steam turbines and integrate them into the four Westinghouse nuclear reactors it plans to build on the site. Perry, 75, who served as U.S. energy secretary between 2017 and 2019 during president Donald Trump’s first term, is a strong proponent of nuclear energy.

“The Chinese are building 22 nuclear reactors today. America has none,” he says in a statement on Fermi’s website. “We’re behind—and it’s all hands on deck. We need to be doing everything in our power to win this race, because this is the race that really matters.”

Fermi’s cofounders believe Trump will help them win that race. The company named the Matador site the “President Donald J. Trump Advanced Energy and Intelligence Campus” and Fermi’s website features a clip of Trump signing executive orders. In a press release announcing the Siemens deal, Perry held up Fermi’s data center as an example of Trump’s “energy dominance” agenda.

“No one understands the global energy race better than Donald Trump,” he said in the statement. Toby Neugebauer was just as congratulatory: “I want to thank President Trump for his strong leadership and action in clearing the path for companies like ours to help America win this race.”

Here are the three billionaires, plus one high-profile centimillionaire, from Fermi’s listing on Wednesday:

Toby Neugebauer & family

Stake in Fermi America: $6 billion

Neugebauer was already in his 30s when his father Randy went to Washington to serve as the representative for Texas’ 19th congressional district in 2003. The NYU alum cofounded Houston-based energy private equity firm Quantum Energy Partners in 1998 and ran it until 2014, investing in the prolific Barnett shale gas formation in Texas. He then cofounded and chaired merchant bank Crestmoor Advisors and worked as a partner at Dallas-based investment firms Dorado Capital Partners and Banzai Capital Group before launching Fermi.

Neugebauer was also the CEO and executive chairman of GloriFi, a short-lived “anti-woke” fintech startup that he launched in January 2021. In November 2021, GloriFi raised $55 million from a roster of Republican billionaires and businesspeople, including biotech investor and former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, hedge fund titan Ken Griffin, Palantir cofounder Joe Lonsdale and Peter Thiel‘s Founders Fund. But the firm shut down a year later and filed for bankruptcy in February 2023. Neugebauer is suing his former partner and his billionaire backers, claiming they sabotaged his startup. (The defendants denied the allegations, and the lawsuit has been stayed in connection with the bankruptcy but remains ongoing.)

Besides his stake in Fermi, Neugebauer is also a part-owner of Major League Soccer’s Austin FC, has a 180-foot yacht named Purpose and owns a 16,000-square-foot estate nicknamed the “White House of Dallas” for being a replica of the presidential mansion.

Griffin Perry

Stake in Fermi America: $2.3 billion

Another political heir who stayed in the private sector, Perry became president of Caddis Energy, an oil and gas investment company, in 2012, then cofounded Grey Rock Investment Partners—which also focused on an energy portfolio—just a year later. Today, the firm manages over $1 billion. In a departure from GOP orthodoxy, Grey Rock says on its website that it looks for opportunities to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions and “integrate environmental, social, and governance (“ESG”) considerations into all of our business decisions.” Perry also serves on the board of publicly traded fossil fuel exploration and production company Granite Ridge Resources and owns shares worth about $6 million.

Steven Meisel

Stake in Fermi America: $1.8 billion

Meisel is a cofounder and managing partner of Dallas-based private equity firm FG1 Capital, which invests in real estate, small businesses and public stocks in Texas and surrounding states. Before joining FG1, the New Orleans native was co-CEO of Discovery Midstream Partners, where he led the development of an oil & gas pipeline project in Colorado that was sold to energy firm Williams Companies for $1.2 billion in 2018. Meisel is also a senior advisor for the Canadian Pension Plan’s sustainable energies group and serves on the board of Denver-based energy infrastructure firm Tallgrass Energy. A former investment banker, Meisel also serves on the board of Baylor Scott & White Dallas Foundation, which raises money for the largest non-profit health system in Texas.

Rick Perry

Stake in Fermi America: $540 million

A career politician who rose from Texas legislator to governor of the second-largest state, Perry is probably best known nationally for two unsuccessful runs for president. In 2016, the most recent, he filed a financial disclosure declaring assets worth between $900,000 and $2.2 million, per an analysis from government watchdog OpenSecrets. After Donald Trump won, he made Perry his energy secretary. That didn’t swell his bank account much either, and the former Texas governor left the administration that same year to join the board of Energy Transfer, a $59 billion (market capitalization) natural gas pipeline company cofounded by billionaire Kelcy Warren. He now owns 188,254 shares of Energy Transfer, worth over $3 million at Wednesday’s close, plus a 6,600-square-foot home in rural Round Top, Texas and a 2.5% stake in Fermi.