Why Trump’s social media company is merging with a fusion power firm. The $6 billion deal raises thorny conflict of interest questions. “The only real value DJT offers an energy company is political leverage.” “significant concerns about conflicts of interest and avenues for political corruption.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/12/18/trump-media-merge-with-fusion-power-developer-6-billion-deal/

by mafco

13 comments

  1. The only reason to do it is to get sweet government money. In the name of science, of course.

  2. The quote about political leverage is the only part of this that actually makes business sense.

    In this industry, regulatory hurdles and interconnection queues kill more projects than physics does. If you are trying to push speculative tech like fusion, you need exemptions and subsidies way more than you need engineers.

    It is cynical, but looking at the backlog of legitimate renewable projects sitting in permitting purgatory right now, buying the guy who controls the red tape is unfortunately a viable strategy.

  3. Corruption is the exact purpose. trump media is worth nothing. No profits and no likelihood of ever creating any.

  4. Truth Social is an epic failure. Even jumping on the AI bandwagon did nothing for the stock. So now its a pivot to the next hot bubble to hype. Fusion is not coming anytime soon. And to rush it puts the public in jeopardy.

  5. Fits to the crypto bro investors that are also the types who endlessly pour money into Tesla for their pipe dreams

  6. This whole administration may just be the most corrupt ever.

  9. Fusion is a con anyway, a “company” doing fusion research is out there sucking up grants that go no where.

  10. Lol, Trump always finds the biggest dirtbags to do business with.

  11. ‘THORNY’? The language used to describe this nonsense is insipid. How about ‘fucking corrupt’? We’re so,so gone here.

  12. >Why Trump’s social media company is merging with a fusion power firm

    Because one is a failed was-never-going-to-work-dumb-money-investment, and the other is a was-never-going-to-work-dumb-money-investment, so put the two together and you get another chance as a was-never-going-to-work-dumb-money-investment!

    For those not familiar with TAE, they have been around since 1998. Actually the idea is even older. In 1992, [Rostoker](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Rostoker) wrote a paper on colliding beam fusion using storage rings. It had already been known for decades this cannot work, [and this is easily found](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colliding_beam_fusion) in the literature. Basically you can calculate the probability that any fuel ion will scatter outside the diameter of the ring and it’s immediately obvious the fuel simply disappears in a flash. So you use magnets to guide it back into the center, but the same math demonstrates the magnets needed to do so will consume more power than the fusion will produce.

    In 1998, he published a new paper replacing the storage rings with an FRC, which is a type of “smoke ring of plasma” that is self-stable on the order of milliseconds. The idea was that the ions scattering out will be recirculated by the FRC, which is maintaining itself. The problem is that this one sort of scattering is not the only one, just the prominent one. Even if you eliminate that for free, you just end up with some other problem.

    When he published this, in IEEE and Nature, other plasma physicists wrote in explaining why this could never work. He waved away their concerns.

    Among the people he asked for money was the Naval Research Lab, who had been running fusion programs for years. I talked to one of the people tasked with investigating the proposal. He said that they (two of them) started after coffee and by lunch had a dozen reasons that it could not possibly work, so they ate, wrote it up, and that was that. He said the proposal was so bad they wondered if Rostoker was having mental problems.

    Now, 27 years later, the company has spent hundreds of millions of dollars of dumb money proving that everyone did actually know what they were talking about. And so now some other dumb money is going to be poured on that dumpster fire in hopes they can get more dumb money.

  13. Fusion energy… lucrative scam.

    Trump… many times proven expert at lucrative scams.

    It’s a match made in heaven.

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