Business
Tony Lam was an original influencer in Little Saigon — and he's still got it
The textured mat is already on the table as Tony Lam sits down to shuffle the polished tiles. He is here to participate in a ritual that he observes four days a week, a pursuit that keeps his “head in shape.”
On this day, sitting in his daughter’s house, he is competing against his wife, son-in-law and grandson, all of whom build a wall of game pieces in front of them.
It’s mah-jongg o’clock, and he’s ready.
One by one, they roll the dice to begin their match, dealing and betting a collection of quarters. Lam, quietly fierce with a booming laugh, studies the spread, and then … his cellphone pings. The original influencer of Little Saigon has been invited to another event — one of dozens each year — a commemoration of the Vietnamese immigration experience in America.
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1. Tony Lam, second from left, plays mah-jongg with his son-in-law James Do, left, grandson Patrick Do, second from right, and Lam’s wife, Hop Lam, in Huntington Beach. 2. Lam lines up his mah-jongg tiles. 3. The game keeps his “head in shape,” Lam says. (Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
He snares a suite of tiles and wins a coin within 11 minutes. Nothing seems to faze him. But as he prepares to make his next move … ping! It’s an invitation to an informal coffee shop meet-up, followed by a business groundbreaking.
Lam, 88, has been a prominent figure in Orange County’s Little Saigon for decades, but his election to the Westminster City Council in 1992 — the first Vietnamese American to win political office in the United States — cemented that status. After 10 years, he announced his retirement from politics, but his continuing activism, even into his 80s, helped set in motion a series of political movements and cultural upheaval in Southern California.
Tony Lam with his wife, Hop Lam, and three of his children.
(Courtesy of the Lam family)
On April 30, the 50th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, his community will be in the spotlight, as news reports highlight the growth and influence of the Vietnamese community in Southern California. In Orange County, where 2020 census data show nearly 242,000 residents of Vietnamese heritage, there are Vietnamese Americans on the city councils in Westminster — the original home of Little Saigon —Fountain Valley, Garden Grove and Santa Ana.
“He’s part of a wave of people that transformed California,” said Jeffrey Brody, a retired professor of communications at Cal State Fullerton who’s writing a social history of the origins of Little Saigon. “The reason the public pays attention to this group, especially locally, is because the community has invested in the building blocks of democracy.”
Lam was there from the start — opening doors, collecting awards, trying to thread the needle in controversies that threatened to destabilize his community — and he’s still filling his calendar with events — a reminder that his role as a trailblazer has not been forgotten.
A CIA employee helps Vietnamese evacuees onto a helicopter half a mile from the U.S. Embassy in Saigon in 1975.
(Bettmann Archive via Getty)
Lam grew up in northern Vietnam and made his way south after the country was split into two states. In the south, he held a series of jobs that brought him in contact with U.S. entrepreneurs and diplomats. At 28, he teamed up with an older sibling, Dean, to manage their Lam Brothers Corp. They were independent contractors unloading ammunition, building supplies and auto parts for the military at Cam Ranh Bay, one of the busiest ports in the world. Lam had learned English from his service in the Vietnamese Navy, and later, through job connections, he got his wife and six children on a flight out of their homeland before the fall of Saigon.
Lam says he stayed behind to help evacuate others. Then U.S. officials sent him to Guam, where he was “assisting in the management of the newcomers there.” After three months, he flew with his family to Camp Pendleton, where a large portion of refugees were sent. Lam was 37 years old and he, his wife, three sons and three daughters bunked in barracks on the base.
He signed on as camp coordinator, trying to bring order to the confusion around him as thousands of adults and children immersed in resettlement. Eventually, he found an American sponsor “and we had the proverbial fresh start,” he recalled, moving briefly to Florida before returning to the West Coast and renting an apartment in Huntington Beach.
In Vietnam, Lam had owned three companies. In Orange County, he took a job pumping gas, and then as a supervisor in shipping and receiving for a firm that produced practice bombs for the Navy.
“It was such irony,” said Lam, who had fled a war just months before.
His wife found work sanding guitars. When Lam picked her up after her first day, he said, he didn’t recognize her right away because her head was covered with dust. Then he burst into tears.
By the end of 1980, about 20,000 refugees were living in Orange County. Like their earlier counterparts, they had fled the communist regime, most of them drawn by news of relatives who had chosen to relocate there. Danh’s Pharmacy, the first Vietnamese-owned business in the area, had opened its doors in 1978 in Westminster, a town that would quickly balloon into a bustling immigrant community, dotted with produce markets, noodle houses, jewelry stores and bakeries.
Lam established a life insurance agency and an import-export business, and in 1984 opened Vien Dong, a restaurant in Garden Grove that quickly gained a following.
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1. (Courtesy of the Lam family) 2. The Lam family in 1975. (Courtesy of the Lam family)
The Little Saigon community expanded into neighboring cities, and in the 1980s, its restaurants, cafes, jewelry and fabric shops and grocery stores started to attract attention throughout California. The first 99 Ranch Market opened in Westminster in 1984.
In 1985, when an 8.0 magnitude earthquake hit Mexico City, killing almost 10,000 people, Lam organized a fundraiser. He was one of the founders of the Vietnamese American Chamber of Commerce and the Vietnamese American Lions Club in Westminster. A law and order conservative, he joined the Republican Party.
Hop Lam, who has been married to him for 64 years, says he moves forward “always with an eye to the past. He learns and he remembers.” He was among the first organizers of the local Tet Festival to celebrate the Lunar New Year — which eventually became the largest celebration outside of Vietnam. He nurtured his businesses and was appointed to serve on Westminster’s traffic commission in 1989.
A campaign sign is posted for Lam, who won a seat on the Westminster City Council in 1992.
(Courtesy of the Lam family)
In addition, “he befriended the white families, the Mexican families and everyone he talked to,” Brody said. When he ran for City Council, “to win, he had to have the support of the Caucasians and the Latinos as well as the Asians.”
Lam’s daughter Cathy Lam said: “When there was something to be done, my father never hesitated. Public service for him is a way to include everyone in decisions and solving problems.”
His community was bound together by family, tradition and staunch anti-communist sentiment — which, in a few years, fueled a controversy that foreshadowed a political shift in Little Saigon.
Lam delivers a speech while campaigning to be the first Vietnamese refugee elected to public office in the U.S.
(Courtesy of the Lam family)
In 1994, the U.S. lifted its trade embargo against Vietnam, and resumed diplomatic ties the following year. Longtime residents of Little Saigon were incensed and organized anti-communist protests. That anger, however, was not universal, evidenced by the interest among a few local merchants in the possibility of expanding their market by doing business in Vietnam.
A few years later, in January 1999, Truong Van Tran posted a Communist flag and a photo of Ho Chi Minh, the late Communist leader, in his video store, which was located on Bolsa Avenue, Little Saigon’s main thoroughfare. Community protests started immediately.
On Jan. 21, an Orange County judge temporarily ordered Tran to remove the items, but she soon reversed herself on Feb. 10, saying the flag and the photo constituted protected speech. The demonstrations continued for 53 days. At one point the crowd grew to about 15,000.
Lam did not join them. He said he understood the anger, but City Atty. Richard D. Jones told him and Westminster officials to stay away; they needed to stay neutral to avoid legal action.
Because Lam was a no-show, protesters picketed outside his restaurant for 73 days. He was called a communist sympathizer, and political rivals vilified him. He hired a lawyer in an attempt to stop the chaos in front of the restaurant. Speaking at a council meeting in February of that year, he said his “heart had been torn apart.” He left office in 2002.
Lam dines with his wife, Hop, and other family members on April 9.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
It was the greatest trial of his political life, Lam said, remembering his efforts to balance his loyalty to his Vietnamese community with the city’s interests.
During the tumult, some younger members of the Vietnamese community, already questioning their status on the sidelines of a local political infrastructure that didn’t include them, inserted themselves in the conversation.
Lan Quoc Nguyen, who’d been an attorney for only three years, got involved by “negotiating with city staff and police to allow the protesters to stay” around the store property for hours on end. “Pretty soon, we realized that in order to gain respect, to be listened to by people who run the greater society, we had to have a seat at the table…. We started digging in,” Nguyen said.
Nguyen, along with Van Tran, the first Vietnamese American elected to the Garden Grove City Council in 2000, described the movement as “political empowerment.” They gathered volunteers for massive voter registration drives, one after another in consecutive elections. Offering Cokes and banh mi and often free entertainment from top refugee musical acts, the inaugural “Rock N Vote” and get-out-the-vote gatherings were staged at UC Irvine and parks with one constant element — handy translators to interpret English-language materials.
Leading figures in the arts, business, education, politics and cultural preservation were honored at a celebration in Westminster’s Little Saigon in early March. Among them was Tony Lam, right.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
“This is what cemented political power,” Brody said. “Not having anyone to recruit their opinions or participation, the Vietnamese organized themselves into a powerful voting bloc and from then on, you saw all kinds of candidates running for all kinds of seats.”
In 1975, when the Vietnamese came over, Cathy Lam said, “we all worried about putting food on the table. Over the years, as our kids got older, as all of us understood more about U.S. history — the Civil Rights Act, the Clean Water Act, the Affordable Care Act, what the EPA stands for — we became a little less conservative, a little more moderate. At the end of the day, the community sees it’s making money. They have to give back by getting deeply involved in politics.”
Today in Orange County, there are at least 24 Vietnamese Americans in city and county offices, and there are others on school boards, sanitation and water boards and in Orange County Superior Court. Tri Ta, Westminster’s first Vietnamese American mayor, is serving in the state Assembly, and last year, Derek Tran became the first Vietnamese American from California elected to federal office, representing the 45th Congressional District.
Tran met Lam at his swearing-in ceremony in December. “I’ve known his name for a long, long time,” said Tran, who ousted Republican stalwart Michelle Steel in the competitive congressional race. “His daughter and her son walked the neighborhoods and knocked on doors for me, helping me get elected. Without having someone like him, it would not have been possible for me to have my seat here. He truly blazed the trail.”
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1. Hop Lam prepares a family meal in April. 2. Tony Lam digs into a full spread of Vietnamese dishes. (Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
During the event, Lam kept pulling Tran aside to say how proud he was of the younger man, prompting the new congressman to add, “It makes me so happy to hear that from someone of his stature.”
Terry Rains, an activist who launched the Westminster Buzz Facebook page and has been a steady presence at council meetings since 2019, says she expects to see more Tony Lams in office, “but you can’t ignore the Andrew Do thing.”
Last October, Do, a former Orange County supervisor, admitted guilt in funneling more than $10 million in federal pandemic funds through a nonprofit linked to his daughter. He received more than $550,000 in bribes from money slated to buy meals for elderly Little Saigon residents — shocking the political establishment of the county.
Lam called it a “tragedy,” but his phone still pings with political newbies scheduling appointments to visit with him for advice, an endorsement or a donation. He kept his profile “as one of the originals in Little Saigon,” said Van Tran, who ascended to state office as the first Vietnamese American elected to California’s Assembly. “He inspires because he’s outspoken and true to himself.”
“My intention is to help everyone,” said Lam, at a recent playground dedication in Westminster’s Tony Lam Park. “That’s how I operate.”
Ships near the Strait of Hormuz before and after attacks began
Every day, around 80 oil and gas tankers typically pass through the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway off Iran’s southern coast that carries a fifth of the world’s oil and a significant amount of natural gas.
On Monday, just two oil and gas tankers appear to have crossed the strait, according to a New York Times analysis of shipping activity from Kpler, an industry data firm. Since then, one tanker passed through.
“It’s a de facto closure,” said Dan Pickering, chief investment officer of Pickering Energy Partners, a Houston financial services firm. “You’ve got a significant number of vessels on either side of the strait but no one is willing to go through.”
Tankers have been staying away from Hormuz since the U.S.-Israeli attacks on Iran that began on Saturday. A prolonged conflict could ripple broadly across the global economy, threatening the energy supplies of countries halfway around the world and stoking inflation.
International oil prices have climbed 12 percent since the fighting began, trading Tuesday around $81 a barrel, and natural gas prices have surged in Europe and in Asia.
A senior Iranian military official threatened on Monday to “set on fire” any ships traveling through the Strait of Hormuz. Vessels in the region have already come under attack. Several oil and gas facilities have also been struck or affected by nearby shelling, though the damage did not initially appear to be catastrophic.
Where ships and energy facilities have been damaged
A fire broke out Tuesday at a major energy hub in Fujairah, United Arab Emirates, from the falling debris of a downed drone, the authorities said. On Monday, Qatar halted production of liquefied natural gas, or fuel that has been cooled so that it can be transported on ships, after attacks on its facilities.
The sharp reduction in tanker traffic is reducing the supply of oil and gas to world markets, pushing up prices for both commodities. And the longer that ships stay away from the Strait of Hormuz, the less oil and gas get out to the world, which could raise prices even more.
Shipping companies have paused their tankers to protect their crew and cargo, and because insurance companies are charging significantly more to cover vessels in the conflict area.
On Tuesday, President Trump said that “if necessary,” the U.S. Navy would begin escorting tankers through the strait. He also said a U.S. government agency would begin offering “political risk insurance” to shipping lines in the area.
In addition to tankers, other large vessels regularly go through the strait, including car carriers and container ships. In normal conditions, nearly 160 make the trip each day.
Some ships in the region turn off the devices that broadcast their positions, while others transmit false locations — making it hard to give a full picture of the traffic in the strait.
The Shiva is a small oil tanker that has repeatedly faked its location, according to TankerTrackers.com, which tracks global oil shipments. It is suspected of carrying sanctioned Iranian oil, according to Kpler. The Shiva was one of the two tankers that crossed the strait on Monday.
The oil and gas that typically move through the strait come from big producing countries like Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran and United Arab Emirates, and are exported around the world.
Where tankers moving through the Strait have traveled
In 2024, more than 80 percent of the oil and gas transported through the Strait of Hormuz went to Asia. China, India, Japan and South Korea were the top importers, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
Countries have energy stockpiles that could last them into the coming months, but a continued shutdown of the strait could damage their economies.
Several big disruptions have roiled supply chains in recent years, but the tanker standstill in the Strait of Hormuz could have an outsize impact.
Paramount Skydance’s jubilation over its come-from-behind victory to claim Warner Bros. Discovery has entered a new phase:
Call it the deal-debt hangover.
Two major ratings agencies have raised concerns about Paramount’s credit because of the enormous debt the David Ellison-led company will have to shoulder — at least $79 billion — once it absorbs the larger Warner Bros. Discovery, bringing CNN, HBO, TBS and Cartoon Network into the Paramount fold.
Fitch Ratings said Monday that it placed Paramount on its “negative” ratings watch, and downgraded its credit to BB+ from BBB-, which puts the company’s credit into “junk” territory. Fitch said it took action due to “uncertainty” surrounding Paramount’s $110-billion deal for Warner Bros. Discovery, which the boards of both companies approved on Friday.
S&P Global Ratings took similar action.
To finance the Warner takeover, Ellison’s billionaire father, Larry Ellison, has agreed to guarantee the $45.7 billion in equity needed. Bank of America, Citibank and Apollo Global have agreed to provide Paramount with more than $54 billion in debt financing.
“Potential credit risks include the prospective debt-funded structure, Fitch’s expectation of materially elevated leverage and limited visibility on post-transaction financial policy and capital structure,” Fitch said.
Late last week, Paramount sent $2.8 billion to Netflix as a “termination fee” to officially end the streaming giant’s pursuit of Warner Bros. That payment paved the way for Warner and Paramount’s board to enter into the new merger agreement.
Paramount hopes the merger will be wrapped up by the end of September. It needs the approval of Warner Bros. Discovery shareholders and regulators, including the European Union.
Paramount executives acknowledged this week the new company would emerge with $79 billion in debt — a considerably higher total than what Warner Bros. Discovery had following its spinoff from AT&T. That 2022 transaction left Warner Bros. Discovery with nearly $55 billion of debt, a burden that led to endless waves of cost-cutting, including thousands of layoffs and dozens of canceled projects.
Warner still has $33.5 billion in debt, a lingering legacy that will be passed on to Paramount.
Paramount plans to restructure about $15 billion in Warner Bros. Discovery’s existing debt.
Paramount CEO David Ellison at a 2024 movie premiere for a Netflix show.
(Evan Agostini / Invision / AP)
Paramount told Wall Street it would find more than $6 billion in cost cuts or “synergies” within three years — a number that has weighed heavily on entertainment industry workers, particularly in Los Angeles.
Hollywood already is reeling from previous mergers in addition to a sharp pullback in film and television production locally as filmmakers chase tax credits offered overseas and in other states, including New York and New Jersey.
Some entertainment executives, including Netflix Co-Chief Executive Ted Sarandos, have speculated that Paramount will need to find more than $10 billion in cost cuts to make the math work. More recently, Sarandos went higher, telling Bloomberg News that Paramount may need $16 billion in cuts.
Cognizant of widespread fears about additional layoffs, Paramount Chief Operating Officer Andrew Gordon took steps this week to try to tamp down such concerns.
Gordon is a former Goldman Sachs banker and a former executive with RedBird Capital Partners, an investor in Paramount and the proposed Warner Bros. deal. He joined Paramount last August as part of the Ellison takeover.
During a conference call Monday with analysts, Gordon said Paramount would look beyond the workforce for cuts because the company wants to maintain its film and TV production levels.
Paramount plans to look for cost savings by consolidating the “technology stacks and cloud providers” for its streaming services, including Paramount+ and HBO Max, Gordon said. The company also would search for reductions in corporate overhead, marketing expenses, procurement, business services and “optimizing the combined real estate footprint.”
It’s unclear whether Paramount would sell the historic Melrose Avenue lot or simply centralize the sprawling operations onto the Warner Bros. and Paramount lots in Burbank and Hollywood.
Workers are scattered throughout the region.
HBO, owned by Warner Bros. Discovery, maintains its West Coast headquarters in Culver City; CBS television stations operate from CBS’ former lot off Radford Avenue in Studio City; and CBS Entertainment and Paramount cable channels executive teams are located in a high-rise off Gower Street and Sunset Boulevard, blocks from the Paramount movie studio lot.
“The combination of PSKY and WBD could create a materially stronger business than either individual entity,” Standard & Poor’s said in its note to investors. “However, this transaction presents unique challenges because it would involve the combination of three companies, with the smallest, Skydance, being the controlling entity.”
David Ellison’s production firm, Skydance Media, was the entity that bought Paramount, creating Paramount Skydance.
Ellison has not announced what the combined company will be called.
Paramount shares closed down more than 6% Tuesday to $12.45.
Warner Bros. Discovery fell 1% to $28.20. Netflix added less than 1% to close at $97.70.
So much Trump-related news has appeared lately on the airwaves and in web pixels — what with Iran and Epstein and Minnesota and so on — that inevitably a nugget will fall between the cracks.
That seems to have been the fate of the most recent annual financial report of Trump Media and Technology Group, which covered calendar year 2025 and was issued Friday.
Trump Media, which is 52% owned by Donald Trump and trades on Nasdaq with a ticker symbol based on his initials (DJT), is the holding company for Trump’s social media platform, Truth Social.
The value of TMTG’s brand may diminish if the popularity of President Donald J. Trump were to suffer.
— A risk factor disclosed by Trump Media
The annual financial disclosure has garnered minimal press coverage. That’s a pity, because it makes fascinating reading, though not in a good way.
Here are the top and bottom lines from the 10-k annual report: Trump Media lost $712.1 million last year on revenue of about $3.7 million. That’s quite a bit worse than its performance in 2024, when it lost $409 million on revenue of about $3.6 million. The company attributed most of the flood of red ink to “loss from investments,” of which more in a moment.
Truth Social isn’t an especially strong keystone of this operation. The platform is chiefly an outlet for Trump’s social media ramblings and the occasional official White House statements. But no one has to sign in to Truth Social to see them — they’re almost invariably picked up by the news media or reposted by users on other platforms such as X.
That might explain Truth Social’s relatively scrawny user base. The platform is estimated to have about 2 million active users, according to the analytical firm Search Logistics. By comparison, X has about 450 million monthly active users and Facebook has more than 2.9 billion.
It’s no mystery, then, why TMTG disdains “traditional performance metrics like average revenue per user, ad impressions and pricing, or active user accounts, including monthly and daily active users,” according to its annual report.
Relying on those metrics, which are used to judge TMTG’s social media rivals, “might not align with the best interests of TMTG or its stockholders, as it could lead to short-term decision-making at the expense of long-term innovation and value creation.”
Instead, the company says it should be evaluated based on “its commitment to a robust business plan that includes introducing innovative features, new products, new technologies.” But it also acknowledges that, at its heart, TMTG is a proxy for “the reputation and popularity of President Donald J. Trump.” The company warns that “the value of TMTG’s brand may diminish if the popularity of President Donald J. Trump were to suffer.”
How has that played out in real time? Trump Media notched its highest closing price as a public company, $66.22, on March 27, 2024, the day after its initial public offering. In midday trading Monday, the shares were quoted at $11.08, for a loss of 83% since the IPO.
One can’t quibble with stock market price quotes; nor can one finagle annual profit and loss statements, at least not without receiving questions, and perhaps lawsuit complaints, from attentive investors and the Securities and Exchange Commission.
In recent months, TMTG has engaged in a number of baroque financial transactions.
In May, the company announced that it was planning to raise $3.5 billion from institutions to invest in bitcoin, with the money to come from issues of common and preferred shares. The goal was to climb onto the cryptocurrency train, which Trump himself was fueling by, among other things, issuing an executive order promoting the expansion of crypto in the U.S. and denigrating enforcement efforts by the Biden administration as reflecting a “war on cryptocurrency.”
Under Trump, federal regulators have dropped numerous investigations related to cryptocurrencies. Trump has also talked about creating a government crypto strategic reserve, which would entail large government purchases of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies; a March 3 announcement on that subject briefly sent bitcoin prices soaring by nearly 20%, though they promptly fell back.
Then there’s TMTG’s relationship with Crypto.com, a Singapore-based crypto “service provider” best known to Angelenos unfamiliar with the crypto world as the firm with naming rights to the Los Angeles arena that hosts the NBA Lakers and Clippers, WNBA Sparks and NHL Kings.
In August, Crypto.com and TMTG announced a deal in which TMTG would pursue a crypto treasury strategy consisting mostly of Cronos tokens, a cryptocurrency sponsored by Crypto.com. The initial infusion would consist of 6.4 billion Cronos valued at $1 billion, or about 15.8 cents per Cronos.
As of Dec. 31, TMTG said in its 10-K, it owned 756.1 million Cronos, acquired at a cost of about $114 million, or 15 cents each. By year’s end, they were worth only about nine cents each, for a paper loss of about $46 million. In trading this week, Cronos was quoted at about 7.6 cents, producing a paper loss for TMTG of about $56.5 million, or roughly half the investment.
The financial maneuvering involved in this trade is a little dizzying. The initial transaction was a 50% stock, 50% cash trade in which Crypto.com bought $50 million in TMTG stock and TMTG bought $105 million in Cronos. Who gained in this deal? It’s almost impossible to say.
Crypto.com did gain, if not purely in cash, then arguably through the Trump administration’s good graces.
On March 27, the SEC formally closed an investigation of the company that it had launched during the Biden administration, when the agency was headed by a known crypto skeptic, Gary Gensler. Trump appointed a crypto-friendly regulator, Paul Atkins, as Gensler’s successor.
It’s reasonable to note that as a business model, crypto treasuries have been in vogue over the last year or so, allowing investors to play the crypto market without all the complexities of actually buying and holding the digital assets by buying shares in treasury companies.
I asked Crypto.com whether the steady decline in Cronos’ price suggested that the hookup with TMTG wasn’t bearing fruit. “The fluctuation in value during this time period is consistent with the entire crypto market, which is typical in a bear market,” company spokeswoman Victoria Davis told me by email.
Davis also asserted that the SEC’s investigation of the company had been closed by Gensler, “not the current administration” (i.e., Trump). That’s misleading, at best. Gensler put the investigation on hold after the 2024 election, when it became clear that Trump was going to be in charge.
Crypto.com’s March 27 announcement of the formal end of the case attributed the action to “the current SEC leadership” and blamed the case on “the previous administration.” I asked Davis to explain the discrepancy but got no reply.
TMTG, like Crypto.com, attributed the decline in Cronos’ value to the secular bear market raging in the entire cryptocurrency space, a reflection of “temporary price swings across the crypto market,” said TMTG spokeswoman Shannon Devine. She said the price decline “will not diminish our enthusiasm for the enormous potential of the [CRONOS] ecosystem.”
Trump’s coziness with crypto companies hasn’t gone unnoticed by Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee, who issued a scathing report on the topic in November. (The White House scoffed at the report, saying in response to the report that Trump “only acts in the best interests of the American public.”)
In mid-December, TMTG launched yet another remaking — this time, plunging into the business of fusion power. The instrument is TAE Technologies, a Foothill Ranch-based company working to develop the technology of nuclear fusion as a clean energy source. According to a Dec. 18 announcement, TMTG and TAE will merge, creating what they say is a $6-billion company.
According to the announcement, TMTG will contribute $200 million to the merged company when the deal closes in mid-2026, and an additional $100 million subsequently. Following the merger, TMTG said last month, it will consider spinning off Truth Social into a new publicly traded company.
These arrangements are murky. TAE is privately held and the value of Truth Social is conjectural at best, so TMTG shareholders could be hard-pressed to assess their gains or losses from the merger and spin-off.
What makes them even murkier is the speculative nature of fusion as an electrical power source. Although numerous companies have leaped into the field — and TAE, which has been backed by Alphabet, the parent of Google, is among the oldest — none has shown the capability of generating electrical power at commercial scale with the elusive technology.
Although some researchers say that fusion could become a technically and economically feasible power source within 10 years, only in 2022 did fusion researchers (at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) achieve the goal of using fusion to produce more energy than is required to sustain a reaction. They were able to do so only for less than a billionth of a second.
Others working on the technology have expressed doubts that fusion could become a viable power source before the 2040s. The technical challenges, including how to convert the energy produced by a fusion reactor into electricity, remain daunting.
All this points to the fundamental question of what TMTG is supposed to be. TMTG’s original mission, according to its own publicity statements, was to build Truth Social into an alternative social media platform “to end Big Tech’s assault on free speech by opening up the Internet.”
Spinning off Truth Social would place that goal on the side. TMTG is on its way too becoming a hodgepodge of crypto, fusion and other investments selected without regard to whether they fit together or are even achievable. The only constant is Trump himself.
If you want to invest in him, TMTG may be the best way to do it. But judging from its latest financial disclosure, that’s not the same as being a good way to do it.
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