President Donald Trump saw a huge increase in his net worth in a single day last week with shares of Trump Media & Technology Group surging after the company announced a merger with private nuclear fusion company TAE Technologies valued at $6 billion.
According to Forbes, Trump’s net worth rose by $504 million to an estimated $6.7 billion last Thursday due to his majority ownership of Trump Media, currently held revocable trust managed by his eldest son, Donald Jr.
The merger is controversial because it poses a glaring conflict of interest, ethics experts warn, because it means that Trump will soon simultaneously have a major financial interest in a rapidly expanding energy company whose fortunes will be influenced by the actions of a government that Trump himself presides over, noted CNN.
Nuclear fusion companies are regulated by the federal government and will likely need federally-supported research and development to become commercially viable. The merger needs to be approved by federal regulators — some of whom were nominated by Trump.
“There is a clear conflict of interest here,” Richard Painter, the top ethics official under former President George W. Bush, told CNN in a phone interview. “Every other president since the Civil War has divested from business interests that would conflict with official duties. President Trump has done the opposite.”
The all-stock merger with TAE will transform Trump Media, the parent company of Truth Social, from an underperforming niche social media and media platform into a speculative venture in clean energy and advanced technology of great interest to the financial markets, Forbes observed.
Fusion energy is considered a possible “holy grail” of clean energy, as it offers significant energy generation without carbon emissions.
While government researchers have achieved impressive results in recent years, no private company has reached the point where the fusion reaction creates as much energy as it consumes, reported The New York Times.
In 2018, TAE’s chief executive, Michl Binderbauer, said he expected the company to achieve that milestone in five or six years. Last Thursday, the merged companies said they plan to create the first “utility-scale fusion power plant” next year.
Meanwhile, the Department of Energy recently created an Office of Fusion to support commercialization.
The deal, should it be completed, would put Trump in competition with other energy companies over which his administration holds financial and regulatory sway, reported the Times, noting that the president has sought to speed up safety reviews of new nuclear power plants and lower thresholds for acceptable radiation exposure.
“Having the president and his family have a large stake in a particular energy source is very problematic,” said Peter A. Bradford, who previously served on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the independent agency that oversees the industry.
The Trump administration has sought to accelerate nuclear power technology — including fusion, which remains unproven — in its drive to meet America’s quickly growing demand for energy, particularly as tech companies build power-hungry data centers in the race for artificial intelligence, the Times noted. That support has come in the form of federal loans and grants, as well as executive orders directing the NRC to review and approve applications more quickly.
Painter, now a professor at the University of Minnesota Law School, told CNN that anyone other than the president or the vice president could be committing a crime if they participated in a US government matter that they knew they had a financial interest in.
For instance, he said the secretary of energy would have to recuse him or herself from any matter linked to fusion if they simultaneously had a significant stake in a fusion company.
“It’s only legal because the criminal conflict of interest statute does not apply to the president,” Painter said, adding that while it is “technically legal” he doesn’t believe presidents should be excluded from the law.
White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said in a statement last week that “neither the president nor his family have ever engaged, or will ever engage, in conflicts of interest.” But it’s a statement she’s repeated word for word nearly every time the subject of Trump’s grifting is raised.
A spokeswoman for Trump Media said the company was “scrupulously following all applicable rules and regulations, and any hypothetical speculation about ethics violations is wholly unsupported by the facts.”
Reaction online to the proposed deal was largely skeptical:
“Sure, give this endlessly greedy amoral felon a financial incentive to ease restrictions on nuclear technology. What could go wrong?” wrote Byron from Brooklyn in a comment in the Times.
“OK, I get it now,” responded Duncan from Prairie Village, Kansas. “This is why he pulled financing from solar and wind energy. In Kansas, where just over half of our electricity was from wind farms in 2024. we couldn’t understand the move. Now it makes sense.
“More Trump corruption,” wrote Warren from Indiana. “What does his family know about fusion technology? … This is a setup to provide government R&D funding to boost the stock price. It will take decades, at least, to develop fusion power, which currently does not exist. That provides the opportunity for Trump family and friends to do a ‘pump and dump’ boiler room style stock manipulation. Note that his Truth Social business is a failure, having lost 75 percent of its share value.”
“The clown again hypes stuff he knows jack about to grift,” mused @schockwellengleiter in reaction to a Bloomberg podcast about the deal on YouTube.
“Name it: Trumpfusion,” offered @karatsurba4791 in response.
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