US President Donald Trump’s social media company, which recently expanded into streaming and cryptocurrencies, is now aiming to become a fusion energy company. Trump Media & Technology Group and TAE Technologies, a nuclear fusion energy company, announced Thursday that they have reached an agreement for a stock merger valued at more than $6 billion.
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The deal would represent a complete transformation for Trump Media, the parent company of Truth Social, a social media platform that has struggled to gain market share in addition to serving as Trump’s primary online mouthpiece. The company, which is trading in the red, generated about $2.7 million in revenue in the first nine months of the year, mostly from advertising. Its shares, which had previously performed exceptionally well, lost value, falling about 69% this year before the merger was announced.
The announcement boosted Trump Media shares, which opened more than 20% on Thursday. Trump is the company’s largest shareholder, owning a significant stake valued at more than $1 billion — although it was once worth more than $4 billion. His shares are held in a trust managed by his eldest son, Donald Jr., a Trump Media board member.
The president did not comment on the agreement with Truth Social. According to a press release, the merger would create one of the world’s first publicly traded nuclear fusion companies. Some tech companies are eyeing nuclear fusion, a still-experimental technology, as a clean energy source that could help meet the electricity demand of artificial intelligence data centers.
The deal is likely to attract attention because it would indirectly put Trump in competition with other companies seeking to drive and profit from the AI revolution. AI-related companies have driven the stock market higher this year, but have also raised concerns that the technology is eliminating jobs in several sectors. According to a press release, the merging companies plan to create the first “commercial-scale nuclear fusion power plant” in 2026 and intend to build additional plants in the future.
“Fusion energy will be the most significant energy advancement since commercial nuclear power began in the 1950s,” Devin Nunes, CEO of Trump Media, said in the release.
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In an eight-minute conference call with investors Thursday morning, in which speakers did not take questions, Nunes said the merger met the company’s “America First” principles and was “ideally positioned” to usher in the fusion energy revolution.
“Fusion energy will lower energy prices, strengthen our national defense and provide the energy needed to ensure American dominance in AI technology,” he said.
The deal is expected to be approved by Trump Media shareholders. It is unclear whether the merger would require additional regulatory approval beyond the basic approval from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
Producing energy through nuclear fusion is an old cherished dream of scientists. Fusion uses abundant fuels, eliminates the risk of a nuclear accident, and does not produce long-lived radioactive waste. It could produce energy without carbon emissions and available 24 hours a day.
In recent years, government laboratories have produced several tantalizing demonstrations of the potential of nuclear fusion. However, the process is extremely complex to initiate and control, and developing machines that can perform it consistently and at a cost affordable enough to power an electrical grid may require technological advances not yet realized and, perhaps even, materials not yet invented.
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Still, several fusion startups say they are close to building commercial factories. Commonwealth Fusion Systems, a company spun out of research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), intends to build and produce electricity at a power plant in Chesterfield County, Virginia, in the early 2030s. Helion Energy, a startup backed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, has begun construction on a fusion plant in Washington state that is expected to power Microsoft data centers by 2028.
During the conference call with investors this Thursday, Michl Binderbauer, CEO of TAE, said that the company’s progress has reached a point where “capital becomes our biggest challenge.”
“We are ready to move to large-scale fusion energy,” he said, adding that the plan was to “prioritize energy” by 2031.
China is investing heavily in nuclear fusion research as part of its efforts to power more of its economy from clean sources. The government and private investors have invested $2.1 billion this year in a new state-owned fusion company in Shanghai, and government laboratories are building cutting-edge facilities for fusion experiments.
The United States, for its part, has focused its fusion efforts on supporting the growth of the private fusion industry rather than expanding federally funded research initiatives. TAE, originally called Tri Alpha Energy, was founded in 1998. Early investors in the company included astronaut Buzz Aldrin, actor and environmentalist Harry Hamlin and Allen Puckett, former president of Hughes Aircraft, according to the company’s website.
The companies said in the release that TAE has built five fusion reactors and raised more than $1.3 billion over the years, most recently in a June funding round with backing from Chevron and Google, among others. The UK government recently announced a joint venture with TAE in fusion technology.
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