Greg Twinney, CEO of General Fusion (Florencia Tan Jun/Getty Images) |
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Today is Chick-fil-A’s Cow Appreciation Day, its first since before the pandemic. If you love fried chicken more than your dignity, you can receive one free chicken entrée if you visit the chain dressed like a cow. (If you’re wondering what happens when Cow Appreciation Day falls on a Sunday, the celebration seems to historically take place on the second Tuesday in July.) The S&P 500, Nasdaq 100, and Russell 2000 closed lower yesterday as the US and Iran exchanged strikes, sending oil prices higher. Information technology was the worst-performing sector as chip stocks fell, while energy was the best. |
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It’s fitting that a nuclear fusion company would go public via a merger with a blank-check company. General Fusion, which counts Jeff Bezos among its investors, became the first pure-play company of its kind to hit public markets on Monday via a SPAC merger, gaining more than 25%. |
- (Trump Media and Technology Group, you might remember, announced a merger with nuclear fusion company TAE Technologies last year in a deal that has yet to close.)
- “Just imagine a world where we have on-demand, clean, incredibly abundant energy in a way that nothing else provides at this point,” CEO Greg Twinney told us from the Nasdaq on Monday. The thing is…
- Scientists have been dreaming on nuclear fusion since before the Manhattan Project; Einstein’s most famous formula (E = mc2) provides the foundation behind how this can create energy.
- The old joke is that nuclear fusion is the energy source of the future… and it always will be.
- General Fusion is looking to retire that jab through its hybrid approach (colorfully referred to as “steampunk”) to heat nuclei to ridiculously high temperatures and compress them to release energy. It’s aiming for 100 million degrees Celsius by 2028, with the goal of having a viable nuclear fusion power plant up and running by 2035.
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Nuclear fusion is something that’s incredibly easy to wax poetic about (“you almost need to recreate conditions similar to the Sun and the stars,” per Twinney) and see massive potential in. The CEO called fusion a “trillion dollar market opportunity,” noting that amid an AI boom where “there’s a lot of capital flowing into these other areas, underneath all of that, we’re still gonna need energy.” In the long term — which always seems to be a bit longer than its proponents hope — nuclear fusion could be a truly revolutionary technology. (Heck, if it’s on a quick enough timetable, would we really need data centers in space?) But in the here and now, it’s a good litmus test on how willing traders are to embrace risk in an environment where the biggest AI beneficiaries of 2026 have been rolling over, and equity supply and cash flows have become top-of-mind considerations. General Fusion is a zero-revenue company; so too is Oklo, which engages in the “easier” type of nuclear power. Being tied to “the energy source of the future” has made Plug Power the most interesting stock chart in history, by my money — and that’s with hydrogen fuel cells having fewer engineering challenges than nuclear fusion. But “interesting” hasn’t made long-term holders any money. Read the full interview |
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*Event contracts are offered through Robinhood Derivatives, LLC — probabilities referenced or sourced from KalshiEx LLC or ForecastEx LLC. |
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