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In a surprising move, Trump Media and Technology Group (DJT) said on Thursday that it is fusing itself to a fusion company. The company will merge with TAE Technologiesa privately held fusion energy firm thats backed by Alphabet, Chevron Technology Ventures, and othersin a deal thats worth more than $6 billion. Its an all-stock deal, which is expected to close sometime next year, and is a huge and eyebrow-raising move for Trump Media, which is best known as the owner of President Trumps social media platform, Truth Social. When all is said and done, shareholders of both companies will own approximately 50% of the combined company on a fully diluted equity basis, per the company release. Following the announcement, DJT shares jumped nearly 30% during premarket trading. The stock was up almost 35% in early trading on Thursday as of this writing. However, shares are down nearly 70% year to date, and are down roughly 92% from their peak in March 2022. Why is this merger happening? As for the logic behind the surprising merger, the combined company aims to build massive fusion power plants that can supply energy to power the ongoing AI boom. In 2026, the combined company plans to site and begin construction on the worlds first utility-scale fusion power plant (50 MWe), subject to required approvals,” the company’s statement reads. “Additional fusion power plants are planned and expected to be 350 500 MWe.” It added: Fusion power plants are expected to provide economic, abundant, and dependable electricity that would help America win the A.I. revolution and maintain its global economic dominance. Devin Nunes, chairman and CEO of Trump Media and a former California congressman, echoed the sentiment in a statement included in that releasein true Trumpian fashion. Trump Media & Technology Group built uncancellable infrastructure to secure free expression online for Americans, and now were taking a big step forward toward a revolutionary technology that will cement Americas global energy dominance for generations, he said, adding that “fusion power will be the most dramatic energy breakthrough since the onset of commercial nuclear energy in the 1950s.” Notably, there are not currently any operating fusion power plants. A report published in October by the Clean Air Task Force, a nonprofit environmental group, counts 29 fusion energy startups in the U.S. that have attracted significant funding in recent years. Further, the latest annual survey from Fusion Industry Association found that 75% of respondents dont expect fusion power plants to start supplying energy to the grid until the 2030s.
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E-Commerce
Every year since 2010, Ive posted an article about what trend I expect to dominate the next twelve months. Throughout the 2010s, these forecasts usually focused on emerging technologies or new currents in management thinking. But around 2020, that began to shift. The annual trends increasingly centered on how we cope with change rather than the change itself. Last year my trend was The Coming Realignment. History tends to propagate at a certain rhythm and then converge and cascade around certain points. Years like 1776, 1789, 1848, 1920, 1948, 1968, 1989and, it seems, 2020mark these inflection points. The years that follow are usually spent absorbing the shock and navigating the consequences. Today, everything is up for question. Will AI boom or bust? Will it take our jobs or bring new prosperity? What kind of economic system will we adopt for the future? We are in the midst of a great realignment. What we know from previous inflections is that what comes after will be profoundly different from before. What we most need to watch is our institutions. AI boom or bust? Today, the AI investment boom is without a doubt the single biggest factor propping up the US economy. Just this year, tech giants are expected to invest roughly $364 billion in the technology. And the spending wont stop there. McKinsey projects that building AI data centers could add up to $5.2 trillion in investment by 2030. This boom is different from what weve seen in the past because the main investors arent speculators or startups, but some of the worlds most profitable companies, including Alphabet, Meta, and Microsoft. Unlike in past cycles, if the industry hits a downturn, there will still be tens of billions of dollars in annual profits to cushion the blow. Still, as investor Paul Kedrosky points out, there are reasons to worry. Investment in data center infrastructure has already surpassed the peak of the dot-com boom and is beginning to approach levels last seen during the railroad frenzy of the 19th century. Also, 60% of the cost of those data centers goes to AI chips, which have a useful life of only about three years. That means this is not a boom that can wait decades to pay off. If todays investments dont generate returns in the near future, much of the infrastructure could fully depreciate before delivering meaningful profit. In practical terms, unless tech firms can earn more than $200 billion in profiton these investments alone, not from their core businessesthey will be underwater. And as investment accelerates, that bar only rises. Kedrosky also notes signs of growing systemic risk. Increasingly, tech giants are choosing to finance their infrastructure build-outs with Enron-like special-purpose vehicles. These structures cost more but keep the debt off their balance sheets. That risk, in turn, is increasingly being passed to more traditional investors, including REITs. Will AI displace humans or enhance us? A 2023 report by the World Economic Forum, analyzing 673 million jobs, predicted structural job growth of 69 million jobs and a decline of 83 million, an overall decrease of 14 million jobs. An IMF analysis found that 40% of global employment is exposed. In an interview with Axios, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs in the next one to five years. Yet more grounded economic analyses suggest a much more modest impact. A study by the St. Louis Fed suggests a 1.1% increase in aggregate worker productivity, with much of that increase concentrated in the tech sector. A paper by Nobel laureate Daron Acemoglu, which looks at total factor productivity (TFP), a measure which takes use of capital into account, sees a 0.66% increase over 10 years, translating to a 0.064% increase in annual TFP growth. A recent McKinsey report takes an optimistic view. While noting that many routine office and production jobs are likely to disappear, those that leverage technical, social and emotional skills are likely to flourish, just as Autor has predicted. However, there is reason to suspect that optimists may be merely extrapolating from historical trends that may no longer apply. Theres no guarantee that the future will look like the past. An analysis in Harvard Business Review suggested that AI could disrupt the non-routine creative work that, to this point, has been hard to automate. Meanwhile, research in Science has found that, although AI may enhance individual creative work, it diminishes the diversity of novel output, potentially stifling the very innovation it aims to support. What will be the economic system of the future? Before 1789 the world was ruled by the divine right of kings and the feudal system. Yet that year would prove to be an inflection point. The American Constitution, the French Revolution, and the first Industrial Revolution, already underway since the introduction of the steam engine in 1776, together created a fundamental realignment of power. These forces would build and clash for decades until things came to a head in the revolutionary year of 1848. Today, we seem to be in a similarly liminal space, as we decide what kind of future we want to live in. The next century and a half would be dominated by the tensions between socialism and capitalism. When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, the West was triumphant. Communism was exposed as a corrupt system bereft of any real legitimacy. Yet for anyone paying attention, communism had long been discredited. As far back as the 1930s, Stalins disastrous collectivization and industrialization campaigns had led to mass starvation. By the 1970s, Soviet total factor productivity growth had gone negative, meaning more investment actually brought less output. Yet today, it is capitalism that finds itself under siege from all sides. Leftist progressives like Bernie Sanders and Zohran Mamdani advocate for reining in the private sector and creating a bigger safety net. The mercantilist American president rails against free trade and nationalizes the means of production. Christian nationalists openly call for theocratic rule. At the same time, a new cadre of theorists has emerged whose ideas dont fit the traditional right-left paradigm. New Right thinkers such as Curtis Yarvin and Patrick Deneen call for wholesale reordering of society. On the more technocratic side, a new school of thought is emerging that is associated with Ezra Klein and Derek Thompsons book Abundance. Its the institutions, stupid In Why Nations Fail, economists Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson explain why the fate of nations rests less on innate factors such as geography, culture, or climate and more on the quality and types of institutions they build. In particular, they make the distinction between inclusive institutions and extractive institutions. Inclusive institutions protect property rights broadly across society, establish fair competition, and reward innovation. Extractive institutions, on the other hand, concentrate wealth in the hands of a small elite who exploit the broader population. These elite players control resources and use state power to enrich themselves at society’s expense. We are clearly in a liminal period in which we are struggling to adapt to shifts in technology, economics, and identity. Will AI oppress or empower regular people? Will we trade openly or retreat behind national barriers? Will we focus primarily on our local communities or see ourselves as citizens of a larger planet? As ever, there will be no shortage of pundits predicting the paths the future will take. Many of their narratives will be persuasivebut also mutually contradictory. The real tell will be what kinds of institutions we build and which ones we allow to decay or be destroyed outright. Are we creating institutions that strengthen rights and the rule of law, or those that serve the powerful? The outcome is still unclear, but the lines of battle have been drawn. If you want to know what to expect in the near to mid-term, pay less attention to predictions about technology, politics, or ideology and focus instead on institutions. Those are what create the norms and rituals that will shape the behaviors of the future.
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E-Commerce
Stargazers and scientists are getting a holiday present from the cosmos this week. 3I/ATLAS, an interstellar comet, will get closest to Earth on Friday, December 19, as part of its journey across the galaxy. Lets break the facts of this natural phenomena down because it sounds like it could be the plot of an exciting science fiction thriller. What is an interstellar comet? Much like a Christmas tree, planets in our Solar System revolve around our star, the sun. Its not the only planetary system out there. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, contains other systems, and if you zoom out even further, there are even more. The comet 3I/ATLAS is labeled interstellar because it comes from outside our star system and is not gravitationally bound to the sun. Its on an elliptical vacation of sorts, exploring new locations with a greater freedom than the other objects surrounding it. When was 3I/Atlas discovered? Scientists only recently discovered 3I/ATLAS, on July 1, 2025. The Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System survey telescope, funded by NASA and located in Rio Hurtado, Chile, first laid eyes on the object. This observation caused scientists to go back and look over records from other Atlas telescopes to learn more. These pre-discovery findings found evidence of the comet dating back to June 14, 2025. The comet got its name because it is a tradition to name objects after the people or system that discover them. In this case, it was named after Atlas. The 3 and the I tell the world this is the third interstellar object found. Animation of comet 3I/ATLAS’s trajectory through our solar system. [Animation: NASA/JPL] How close will 3I/ATLAS actually get? On Friday, 3I/ATLAS will get the closest to Earth in its orbit, but close is a relative term. It will cross within 167 million miles of our planet. To put that in perspective, that is around two times the distance between the Earth and the Sun. The comet poses no danger to Earth, meaning there’s no need to hire a ragtag group of oil drillers la the 1998 film Armageddon. How best to view 3I/Atlas Unfortunately, 3I/ATLAS cannot be viewed by the naked eye. Dedicated stargazers will need a small telescope. But the silver lining is that the comet will hang around until spring. For best results, view in the early, predawn hours. According to NASA, those who are extra enthusiastic and planning a Friday adventure should focus on the bright star Regulus in the constellation Leo, as 3I/ATLAS should appear near that location. For those who are without a telescope and would rather sleep in, NASA has done the work for you. You can visit the NASA website to view 3I/ATLAS from many different angles. Maybe the pictures will inspire you to write the next great science fiction tale. Finally, NASA’s “eyes on the solar system” tool lets you view a simulated live version of 3I/ATLAS as it hurls through space.
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E-Commerce
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