TMTG, again

Late last year, Trump Media and Technology Group announced that it planned to merge with TAE, a 27-year-old fusion energy company. It was a weird idea! A strictly inferior version of the X social media platform meant to tie up with a company that hopes to generate energy the way that our sun does. I wrote about it at the time, explaining the rationale for bringing two such different businesses together.

I haven't heard much about the merger lately, so decided to take a look and see what's up.

TMTG has had a lousy year. Its 4Q2025 and 1Q2026 results were poor, shaving about a third off the company's market value over that period. And, as I explained my earlier piece, things hadn't gone much better during the rest of 2025, either.

That led to two high-profile resignations from the TMTG board of directors. In April of this year, Robert Lighthizer, who'd served as US Trade Representative during the first Trump administration, and Eric Swider, who'd run the special-purpose acquisition company that brought TMTG into the public markets in 2022, both stepped down from the board. CEO Devin Nunes was replaced by Kevin McGurn, whose LinkedIn page conspicuously identifies him as TMTG's interim CEO.

This month, a year-old partnership between TMTG and crypto.com has conspicuously fallen apart. Molly White reported on the details of the failed relationship (scroll down about halfway or search for "TMTG" on the page). Crypto.com had invested substantial capital in TMTG, in the form of its proprietary cryptocurrency token, called CRO. TMTG also has large Bitcoin holdings. The value of both CRO and Bitcoin have plummeted this calendar year, driving steep losses – $116.7 million, just from those two holdings.

Finally, TMTG announced in July that it would sell API access to President Trump's social media posts. For a fee, interested parties could buy access to those posts milliseconds ahead of the rest of the platform's users. That advantage was, transparently, aimed at traders who wanted to act on market-moving news before ordinary investors. Media organizations have filed suit over the new offering, introducing new legal risks for TMTG.

With all those developments, TMTG's stock has fallen another 17% or so.

Interim CEO McGurn said, in the earnings call, "[W]e believe fusion can turbocharge America's energy revolution and deliver our country a significant edge in the AI race. I hope this sheds some light on the strategic rationale for why we prioritize this transaction so highly and why we continue to believe it is the single most important driver of long-term value for this company."

That's exactly the rationale I laid out in my original article: the social media business frankly sucks. Management and the board are looking for any other kind of company to be. TAE, the (now) 28-year-old fusion company, is their current best hope.

Given that, why hasn't the merger closed?

In the earnings call, McGurn attributed the delay to the work of auditing TAE's finances, and to the regulatory burden that the deal faces.

I'm skeptical.

The deal team from both companies has had more than eight months since the announcement to prepare and audit TAE's finances. That's a long time for an audit! Even if there were a few skeletons scattered among the closets, there's plenty of legal and finance expertise around the table to have resolved those issues by now.

And, frankly, there's no chance whatever that this deal faces any regulatory risk under the Trump administration. Should it? Yeah, maybe. Will it? Come on.

So again: Why hasn't it closed?

Shareholders in both companies are going to have to vote to approve the merger. I'm pretty sure TMTG's board can deliver its votes. But can TAE's?

I'd wager that there are a bunch of highly-trained PhD scientists on the TAE cap table. This is an administration that's been hostile to science in general, and to scientific research at universities in particular. It's possible that there are votes there that are simply not gettable.

And the President's had a bad year, even ignoring the business results at TMTG. Economic news is bad across the board. The war in Iran drags on, with no clear path out of the embarrassment the US has been dealt so far. The midterms are looming, and Democrats look poised to recapture one or both houses of Congress in November.

Even if you liked this President, you might think twice about getting too close to him, with the subpoena power of the legislative branch aimed in that direction.

McGurn urges us all to watch for TMTG's filing of a form S-4 with the SEC, as clear evidence that the merger is on track. And, of course, sure! That has to happen if the merger is to close. But I bet you that there is more action behind the curtain than "auditors and regulators" could explain.