Business
Did Dodgers underestimate value of Shohei Ohtani's first homer? It may be worth $100,000
A baseball falls from the sky and into a fan’s hands. Or at least it comes to rest near their feet and they reach down and secure it. The fan has taken possession of something that might have monetary value. It is theirs to do with as they wish.
Ambar Roman’s seat in the Dodger Stadium right-field pavilion April 3 became the resting point of Shohei Ohtani’s first home run as a Dodger. The 28-year-old Whittier woman picked up the ball and her world became a swirl.
Roman and her husband, Alexis Valenzuela, say Dodgers security personnel persuaded her to surrender the ball for a bat, a ball and two caps, all autographed by Ohtani. Why? Ohtani wanted the genuine article and told reporters after the game, “For me, it’s a very special ball, so I’m thankful.”
Two experts at auction houses that regularly auction baseball memorabilia said the ball is worth approximately $100,000, while the signed merchandise Roman received in exchange for the ball would sell for less than $10,000.
The current bid for Mike Trout’s 2024 opening day home run baseball is $7,010.00. The MLB hologram sticker authenticated the ball.
(MLB)
Gary Cypres, founder of the Sports Museum of Los Angeles and owner of the greatest collection of Dodgers memorabilia anywhere, said, “I might be willing to pay a little more than the $100,000” but that other Dodgers collectors probably would pay $50,000 to $75,000.
Roman and Valenzuela said the Dodgers told her the ball would be worthless if she took it home because it would not be “authenticated,” a word with a precise meaning regarding sports memorabilia in general and a baseball hit into the stands in particular. The Dodgers have disputed that, saying she was only told that the ball could not be authenticated by MLB.
The couple also said Dodgers personnel would not allow Valenzuela to participate in his wife’s negotiation and did not escort them to the parking lot with their Ohtani-autographed merchandise, resulting in a public relations black eye for a franchise generally regarded as operating with class and in the best interests of its fan base.
The episode isn’t over: Roman and her family are invited to Dodger Stadium on Friday — on her birthday, no less! — during which she will receive more memorabilia and premium seats for giving the ball to Ohtani, who a Dodgers official said is expected to meet her. Onlookers undoubtedly will be calculating whether her haul is roughly equivalent to the six-figure valuation.
Fans applaud Shohei Ohtani as he heads to the dugout after hitting his first homer with the Dodgers.
(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
The Dodgers also said they’re going to analyze how they interact with fans who secure milestone baseballs.
“We’re excited to host them again for a special night and give them a special Dodger experience,” said Lon Rosen, the Dodgers’ executive vice president and chief marketing officer. “And we’re going to review the process.”
Still, the episode raised questions. Did the Dodgers drop the ball by not providing Roman with authentication? If Roman had left the stadium with the ball, would it be worth less at an auction because it wasn’t authenticated? Is the ball authenticated as Ohtani’s first home run even now, in Ohtani’s possession?
And, how does authentication work, anyway?
Fake sports memorabilia and forged autographs were rampant in the 1990s, prompting the FBI to launch a probe called “Operation Bullpen.” San Diego Padres great Tony Gwynn was recruited to participate because he’d flagged several items in a Padres gift shop that featured his forged signature.
The investigation resulted in the convictions of more than 50 people and the dismantling of a dozen or so forgery rings by 2001, the same year Major League Baseball implemented an authentication protocol to protect fans and players alike from fake items in the burgeoning memorabilia market.
Rangers catcher Jonah Heim with the authenticated baseball that was the last out of the 2023 World Series. The authentication hologram sticker is visible at the top of the ball.
(MLB)
The technology used by MLB authenticators — most of whom are current or former law enforcement officers with chain-of-custody training — has evolved. Today, an authenticator sits in each dugout of every game, witnesses the use of every conceivable item from baseballs to bats to bases to lineup cards to uniforms to gloves, and affixes a tamper-proof numbered hologram to identify its authenticity.
An exception? Balls that fly off a bat and into the stands. Chain-of-custody integrity can be compromised as soon as a ball leaves the field. Therefore, home runs such as Ohtani’s initial blast as a Dodger cannot be authenticated — at least not through the strict MLB protocol.
This is where the Dodgers’ version of what transpired with Roman diverges. She told The Times’ Bill Plaschke that the Dodgers informed her that if she kept the ball, the team would not authenticate it and the ball would be worthless. Two Dodgers executives who requested anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the topic said Roman was told the ball could not be authenticated, period. It had nothing to do with whether she chose to take it home or not.
In fact, even in Ohtani’s possession, the ball is not MLB authenticated. Common sense might dictate that video captured Roman holding the ball and celebrating, and that moments later Dodgers security personnel made a beeline to her seat and whisked her away with the ball.
Does anyone really believe she somehow swapped out the ball for another official major league ball that never kissed Ohtani’s lumber?
“The authentication program has a strict rule about not authenticating a ball once it goes into the stands because we know fans bring balls to games and can also get balls from batting practice,” said an MLB spokesman who requested anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak on the record. “Above all else though, the program does not allow for authenticating balls in the stands because it is a chain-of-custody and witness-based program.”
Although the Dodgers may have underestimated the potential value of Ohtani’s first home run with the team and the interest it would generate, MLB makes the decisions pertaining to authentication.
MLB could have implemented “covert marking,” an I-spy-like term meaning that baseballs used during Ohtani’s at-bats would have been marked ahead of time with a combination of letters and numbers. However, the authentication official said covert marking is reserved for milestones, not for “player firsts” such as Ohtani’s first Dodger homer.
Recent examples include career home runs Nos. 500, 600 and 700; career hit number 3,000; the final hits by Derek Jeter and David Ortiz; and the last out at old Yankee Stadium. Cost, the spokesman said, has never been a consideration.
The practice was utilized when Barry Bonds chased Hank Aaron’s career record of 755 home runs in 2007 and most recently was used ahead of Aaron Judge’s 62nd home run in 2022 and Albert Pujols’ 700th career homer that same season.
“The fans that caught the balls were brought under the stadium and had the balls authenticated once the covert marking was confirmed by the authenticator in a private, secure area,” the spokesman said. “This was and always is agnostic of the [fans’] plans for the ball.”
Any item authenticated by MLB can be verified on a website by typing in the hologram identification combination — usually two letters and six numbers.
Before holograms and staff authenticators, memorabilia was authenticated primarily through a photo match. The jersey a player purportedly wore during a milestone moment, for example, could be matched against a photo of the player wearing the jersey in that game. The system wasn’t perfect, but it was better than blindly taking someone’s word.
The technological advances and resources MLB and other leagues have put into authentication is appreciated by David Kohler, owner and president of Orange County-based SCP Auctions for 45 years.
“One of the best things to happen in the thriving memorabilia market is authentication and the authentication process,” he said. “It’s real. Authentication is why prices have gone up. There is a process and it’s great. It makes our job easier.”
Kohler said that while the Dodgers are “a class organization,” the MLB authenticator could have assisted Roman had she opted to keep the ball by making sure the one she left the stadium with was the same one she might later have sold at auction.
“They should have brought the authenticator in there, and he could have marked the ball,” he said. “Then let her go home with the ball and figure it out over the next few days.”
Shohei Ohtani’s first Dodgers homer was caught by Ambar Roman. Experts says the ball is worth about $100,000, while the signed merchandise Roman got from the Dodgers in exchange for the ball would sell for less than $10,000.
(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
The Dodgers might get a chance soon to implement any new policies pertaining to fans and valuable baseballs. Ohtani is one home run from tying former New York Yankees slugger Hideki Matsui for most MLB home runs by a Japanese player at 175, so the next two he hits could pique the interest of Japanese collectors as well as those in the United States.
What’s worth more than the baseballs Ohtani hits to reach milestone home runs? The bats. “Historically, bats from a value standpoint do much better in auctions than balls,” Cypres said.
Kohler and other auction executives can’t rely solely on sports leagues to provide authentication of memorabilia that customers want to buy and sell. They have developed inventive ways of establishing to a compelling degree that an item is everything the seller says it is.
Many items come with a letter of authenticity from the original owner. The 2000 NBA championship ring auctioned by Kobe Bryant’s parents in 2013 is an example: The ring has been sold three times since but continues to be accompanied by the original LOA signed by Kobe’s mother, Pam Bryant.
Several companies offer authentication services that promise to verify autographs, grade trading cards and issue certificates of authenticity. That might not be as ironclad as an MLB hologram sticker, but it weeds out obvious fakes.
The last home run Bonds hit — No. 762 — came Sept. 7, 2007, at Coors Field after MLB ceased supplying his games with covertly marked balls. A scramble for the ball occurred in the stands and MLB refused to authenticate it because of the confusion and lack of conclusive video evidence.
Jameson Sutton ended up with the ball but it wasn’t clear that the home run was Bonds’ last until the season ended three weeks later, at which point its value skyrocketed — if the ball could be authenticated. Enter Kohler, who commissioned a lie detector test that Sutton passed. The lie detector report accompanied the ball, which sold at SCP auction for $377,000 in April 2008.
SCP also auctioned a bat used by Lou Gehrig to hit his last home run, a spring training blast in 1939. Gehrig went homerless in eight games that regular season before retiring because of complications with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, what would come to be known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.
Upon returning to the dugout, Gehrig handed the bat to a Yankees bat boy named Bing Russell, who became a popular television actor. His son is actor Kurt Russell and a grandson is former major leaguer Matt Franco, whose mom, Jill, kept the bat in an umbrella closet for years.
“My grandfather would bring out that bat every time we had people over and the conversation turned to baseball,” Matt Franco said. “He’d pass it around the table and he’d tell stories about all the guys on those teams.”
Jill Franco eventually auctioned the bat through SCP, and Kohler reached out to the Hillerich & Bradsby Co. to confirm it was one of the last models shipped to Gehrig. The venerable bat-making company keeps meticulous records, and an invoice shows the shipment of four bats in August 1938. It was Gehrig’s last order.
The most famous home run ball never found was the one hit by Kirk Gibson to win Game 1 of the 1988 World Series, voted by Times readers as the greatest moment in Dodgers history. The Dodgers commemorated the home run in 2018 by painting in blue the seat — Row D, Seat 88, Section 302 — where the ball is believed to have landed. Gibson even signed the seat.
On Gibson’s behalf, SCP auctioned all other memorabilia associated with the iconic hit — Gibson’s bat, helmet and uniform — bringing in a cool $1 million. The ball, however, is lost in the mist of pre-authenticator history.
“We’ve had people say they have the ball, but it never leads to anything,” Kohler said. “Authenticating it would be extremely difficult, almost impossible.”
Any self-respecting MLB authenticator no doubt would agree.
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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