Business
Frustrated with crowded resorts, more skiers risk avalanche hazards in backcountry
MAMMOTH LAKES, Calif. — On a clear, cold day in mid-February, we had spent hours on backcountry skis trudging up and across a remote mountainside in the eastern Sierra when we noticed that the trees directly above us were much smaller than the others we had passed along the way.
Still panting from the workout, I looked down the steep slope — something I had carefully avoided up to that point — and saw more suspiciously small trees stretching below us.
“Avalanche,” said my ski partner, Howie Schwartz, a veteran backcountry guide. “Huge one, back in the ’80s, reached all the way down to the valley.”
Schwartz demonstrates how to use probes designed to punch holes in avalanche debris to make contact with a buried ski partner.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
To his trained eye, the nearly vertical strip of new growth was a telling sign that we were slogging across the high-alpine version of a bowling alley. On the wrong day, tons of snow piled on the ridge a thousand feet above could release without warning and crash down like a wave that, instead of washing over us, would bury us and quickly solidify into the consistency of concrete.
The odds were firmly in our favor that day: There had been no new snow recently or abrupt changes in the temperature. Still, it was best to not linger, Schwartz said, with a nod to make sure I followed him across to the taller trees.
Avalanches are an unavoidable fact of life in the mountains. Two days after our trip, following a storm that dumped 6 feet of snow in 36 hours, a pair of ski patrollers were caught in an avalanche at nearby Mammoth Mountain resort. One was extracted without serious injury; the other was hospitalized but did not survive.
On the same day, two small avalanches struck at Palisades Tahoe. Nobody was injured, but a year ago four people were trapped and one died in an avalanche at the resort.
As shocking and sad as those cases are, they happened on some of the most aggressively protected slopes in the world. Large commercial ski resorts such as Mammoth and Palisades employ patrol teams that go out every morning before the lifts open to test the stability of the snowpack.
A growing number of skiers are seeking out backcountry slopes, trading the relative safety of crowded resorts for the silence and solitude of untrammeled runs.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
If anything looks suspicious, they deliberately trigger avalanches — using explosives for big stashes of snow, using their skis and body weight for smaller ones — in the hope that no unexpected slides will occur when paying customers are enjoying themselves downhill.
But if things can go wrong at carefully managed resorts, imagine how much risk there is in the backcountry where nobody patrols, cellphone signals are spotty and, even if you can make a call, help might take hours to reach you.
On Monday, a 46-year-old backcountry skier was killed in an avalanche just south of Lake Tahoe. Due to what deputies called “extremely hazardous” conditions, it took an El Dorado County search-and-rescue team more than 24 hours to retrieve the body. They had to use explosives to set off avalanches in the area before it was safe for them to go in, according to a sheriff’s department post on Facebook.
In the last decade, at least 245 people in the U.S. have been killed by avalanches — the vast majority in the backcountry, according to data compiled by the Colorado Avalanche Information Center and the U.S. Forest Service. Some victims were hikers and snowmobilers, but more than half were skiers.
That’s a shocking number given how small the community of hardcore backcountry skiers is. Seemingly everyone who makes the sport a significant part of their lives has lost at least one friend to an avalanche.
“I know of far, far too many who have died,” said Schwartz, 52, who has been guiding professionally for three decades and helped design the curriculum for the country’s most commonly taught avalanche training course. “The longer you do this, the more people you know who die, even professionals, even other guides.”
Schwartz, left, and Dolan install climbing skins, synthetic material that makes it possible to climb to the top of a run wearing backcountry skis.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
Despite the obvious risks, there has been a steady rise in the number of people heading to the backcountry to “earn their turns” in recent years. There was a surge 2020 after ski resorts shut down due to COVID-19, said Steve Mace, director of the Eastern Sierra Avalanche Center, which publishes daily updates on the weather and avalanche risk in California’s high country.
But the number of backcountry skiers didn’t plummet after the pandemic emergency ended, Mace said. One reason is the eye-opening cost of lift tickets: A single day of skiing at Mammoth can cost as much as $219 this season. Another is the crowds: Despite the high cost, standing in a lift line on a holiday weekend can feel a lot like staring at taillights in rush hour on the 405 Freeway.
And then there is the resort vibe. When 19th century California naturalist John Muir famously said, “The mountains are calling and I must go,” he couldn’t possibly have imagined slushy parking lots crowded with Teslas and short tempers, or bars selling $15 beers.
The allure — some would say siren song — of the backcountry is the absence of everything resorts represent.
Even on the most hectic days within the boundaries of Mammoth Mountain, the untouched, unnamed slopes nearby offer precious silence and solitude. With no ski lifts you have to work a lot harder, but there’s something purifying in the effort it takes to climb hundreds of vertical feet to reach the top of a perfect line. The descent through unimaginably light, untracked powder is the reward.
On a good day — with a knowledgeable partner and the avalanche odds in your favor — all it costs is a few calories and a bit of sweat.
“The longer you do this, the more people you know who die, even professionals, even other guides,” Schwartz says of backcountry skiing.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
With all of that in mind, Schwartz and I drove to the end of Old Mammoth Road on a recent weekday, where the gleaming vacation homes end and the landscape turns steeply up toward the Sierra crest.
We glued “skins” to the bottoms of our skis, synthetic material that allows the skis to glide forward through the snow but stops them from sliding backward, making uphill travel possible. We clicked into bindings that held only our toes in place for the uphill, and then, with a quick adjustment, locked our heels in place for the downhill run.
The temperature was well below freezing, but we left most of our layers in our backpacks, because the uphill portion would be an intense workout. We didn’t want to get soaked in sweat on the way up only to freeze on the way down.
Our safety gear included avalanche beacons, devices about the size of an old Blackberry that can send and receive electronic signals. We strapped them to our chests so that if one of us got buried in an avalanche, the other would, theoretically, be able to find the beacon.
We also had probes: long, thin sticks that unfold like tent poles and are designed to punch holes in avalanche debris to make contact with a buried partner. You hope you don’t poke someone in the eye, but if you’re using one, it’s a life-or-death emergency, so it’s no time to be squeamish. We also had collapsible shovels to help us dig if we were lucky enough to find our friend.
We pulled out all the gear and tested it at the bottom of the hill, an exercise that was more sobering than reassuring. Every step in the search-and-rescue process would take time, and someone buried in snow is likely to suffocate within minutes. It became obvious that the best way to stay safe in the backcountry would be to avoid having to use the emergency gear altogether.
Avalanche beacons transmit electronic signals that can help rescuers locate a skier buried in an avalanche.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
That’s harder than it sounds. Predicting whether a snowy hillside might slide depends on a dizzying array of factors, most of which are not obvious to the naked eye. For example, avalanches usually occur on slopes with a 30-degree to 45-degree angle. I’ve been skiing, hiking and climbing for nearly four decades, and I can tell you if something is steep, but the mathematical degree of its slope? I have no idea.
Another crucial factor is the way snow is layered. Think of it like a cake. Some storms are warm and wet, like frosting; others are cold and dry, like crumbly pastry. If a firm layer is resting on top of a weak layer, that’s a recipe for disaster. But it’s difficult to know without encyclopedic knowledge of the season’s weather in that precise location, or digging a deep pit and carefully examining each striation — like performing a bit of impromptu archaeology before your workout.
“If I were going to tell you one thing that really gets my hackles up, it’s a persistent weak layer,” said Mace, the avalanche forecaster. All the other dangers are relatively short-lived. New snow from a storm settles pretty quickly, for example. But a weak layer buried underneath the surface can last for months.
That’s where the Eastern Sierra Avalanche Center website comes in. It provides a color-coded scale of the threat level that takes into account recent weather, the nature of the terrain and the likely consistency of the layers lurking beneath the surface.
Mace, 37, worked for years as a ski patroller and mountain guide before taking on the avalanche forecasting duties at the Eastern Sierra Avalanche Center. Despite the risks, he does almost all of his skiing in the backcountry.
“It brings me a lot of joy and peace. I love the uphill as much as the down,” he said. But Mace, too, said he has seen his share of tragedy. “I have been in this field a long time, and I have lost a lot of friends, people I loved.”
The most valuable lesson he has learned is patience. If he sees a particularly pretty line of snow carving down through some rocks, like an elegant white necklace, he doesn’t just throw on his skis, trudge up the hill and charge down, the way he did in his 20s.
These days, he studies the slope, like a gem cutter before lifting his saw. He watches the weather, assesses the layers and waits for the perfect dusting of powder. He accepts that it might take years for the stars to align.
“It’s a very harsh learning environment,” Mace said, with lots of unreliable “positive feedback.” You might ski something steep and wonderful, where nothing goes wrong, and think you’ve figured things out, he said.
“But there are a million reasons why an avalanche might not release” on any given day, Mace said. “It may not be that you made good choices; it may be that you just got lucky.”
Both Mace and Schwartz said it can be hard to find the right tone when offering advice to new backcountry skiers. They don’t want to underplay the dangers, but they also don’t want to discourage someone from pursuing what, for them, has become a passion.
“What you see more often than not,” Schwartz said, “is that people know what they’re doing is dangerous. They know there’s a mortal risk. But they do it anyway.”
I struggled, mightily, as Schwartz and I continued up and across the rugged slope. I’m a confident resort skier, but it was my first time in the backcountry and the unmanicured conditions proved tougher than I expected.
Wind had scoured away most of the powdery snow, and rain had left a slick, brittle crust. I grunted and cursed trying to get the unfamiliar skis to go where I pointed them. Schwartz smiled patiently and said the snow was “a little grabby,” anyone would struggle with it.
He didn’t, though.
When we finally approached the taller trees, the crunch-crunch of every stride grew steadily softer. There, sheltered beneath the branches of the towering pines, the snow was untouched, like a hillside covered in a foot and a half of down feathers.
Schwartz grinned and said, “This is it, man, this is why we’re here.”
With no ski lifts, backcountry skiers have to work a lot harder, often climbing hundreds of vertical feet to reach the top of a perfect line.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
He reminded me to wait for him to get a good distance ahead. That way, if one of us kicked off an avalanche, we’d be far enough apart that it probably wouldn’t swallow us both, leaving one guy free to rescue the other.
And then he turned his skis parallel with the fall line, gathered some speed and started making effortless bouncy turns through the trees. The snow was so soft, he floated hundreds of feet to the valley floor in perfect silence.
Well, almost perfect. I could hear him laughing.
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.
Augusta picks new planning and development director
CHERRY BLOSSOM COUNTDOWN: Peak Bloom prediction drops Thursday
Bodies of 2 young girls found in suitcases in Cleveland’s South Collinwood neighborhood
Texas Primary: Breakdown of Texas races
Alabama NAACP Releases 2026 Selma Jubilee Weekend Schedule
Florida High School Football Rankings: Top 25 teams – Oct. 21
Cleary's 21 help Le Moyne down Central Connecticut State 69-64 in OT
How old is Bo Nix? What to know about Oregon quarterback ahead of 2024 NFL Draft
99th annual Pony Swim held in Virginia
Indiana Members Credit Union announced as new anchor tenant at Bottleworks District
Video: Senators Question Kristi Noem on ICE Immigration Tactics
Combustible Republican Senate primary in Texas heading into overtime
Hungarian veto proves EU needs less unanimity, says new Dutch PM
Pregnant migrant girls are being sent to a Texas shelter flagged as medically risky
Fraud-plagued Minnesota sues Trump admin for withholding $243M in Medicaid payments
-
World6 days agoExclusive: DeepSeek withholds latest AI model from US chipmakers including Nvidia, sources say
-
Massachusetts7 days agoMother and daughter injured in Taunton house explosion
-
Denver, CO7 days ago10 acres charred, 5 injured in Thornton grass fire, evacuation orders lifted
-
Louisiana1 week agoWildfire near Gum Swamp Road in Livingston Parish now under control; more than 200 acres burned
-
Oregon5 days ago2026 OSAA Oregon Wrestling State Championship Results And Brackets – FloWrestling
-
Florida3 days agoFlorida man rescued after being stuck in shoulder-deep mud for days
-
Maryland3 days agoAM showers Sunday in Maryland
-
Culture1 week agoTry This Quiz on Thrilling Books That Became Popular Movies