Business
Overnight lines, mall fights and instant sellouts: Labubu toy mania comes to America
Every few Fridays, in the middle of the night, a line forms outside the Pop Mart store at Westfield Century City.
It’s the same scene over at Glendale Galleria. And at South Coast Plaza. Victoria Gardens in Rancho Cucamonga, too.
They come by the hundreds, all vying for the latest Labubu, a furry toy character with rabbit-like ears and a nightmarish grin stretched wide over a row of serrated teeth. Labubu, her legion of fans will tell you, is female, the size of a cat and a tad mischievous. She belongs to a Nordic tribe of elves known as the Monsters. She is very soft. They insist her boyfriend is a look-alike figure named Zimomo, but Pop Mart denies the relationship.
A global buying frenzy for all things Labubu erupted in April when Lisa, a member of the popular K-pop girl group Blackpink, posted a video on Instagram of her hugging a large Labubu plush doll. The 27-year-old megastar, who isn’t a brand spokesperson, further fueled the mania by accessorizing her luxury handbags with small Labubu pendants.
Since then, every new release and restock of the plush dolls has sold out within minutes in stores and within seconds online. Grown men and women — Labubu’s core customers are adults, not kids — have fought over her and police recently had to manage an unruly crowd at a Singapore toy show where Labubus were being sold. Last month, a family allegedly broke into a claw machine filled with boxes of Labubus and stole three of them. Fakes and resellers have flooded the market.
It’s a sudden and astonishing ascent for an ugly-cute character that debuted nearly a decade ago, and fortuitous timing for Pop Mart as it makes a major push into the U.S.
Founded in 2010, the Chinese toy maker has seen enormous success overseas for its artist-designed collectibles, growing to around 500 retail shops and 2,500 toy vending machines in 30 countries. The company’s stock price has more than tripled this year, giving Pop Mart a market cap of $12.1 billion. It opened its first permanent U.S. store in September 2023 and has quickly expanded to 16 locations around the country, seven of them in California.
Pop Mart, which makes Labubu and other designer toys, is opening stores around the U.S. after seeing huge success overseas. The Chinese company reported record revenue of $638.5 million for the first half of 2024, a 62% year-over-year increase.
Opened in February, the Century City Pop Mart is a maximalist shrine of whimsical characters such as Skull Panda and Dimoo and their many, many related products: vinyl plush dolls in all sizes, action figures, keychains, stationery, purses and tote bags, cups, hair clips, smartphone and earphone cases, lamps and night lights.
These days Labubu is the must-have character, with her merch universe ranging from an $8.99 fridge magnet to a “Mega 1000%” — a giant 31-inch plastic figurine that sells for $959.90.
Blind boxes are in high demand: The packages are sealed and contain a random product from a collection, injecting an element of surprise and tempting customers to buy boxes over and over until they get the exact figure they want. Similar to packs of baseball trading cards, a few lucky boxes contain rare “secret” figurines that are not part of the regular series.
“It’s a high and it’s excitement,” said Jon Shapiro, 48, who arrived at 2:30 a.m. to be first in line at a recent Pop Mart release in Century City. “You start buying sets and you’re like, ‘OK, well I need the whole collection.’ It’s like you have a mission.”
Shapiro, who owns a home inspection company, visited Pop Mart for the first time in January during a trip to Paris and “just got addicted.”
“It would blow your mind,” he said of the number of Pop Mart collectibles he has since acquired, which span “almost every collection” and fill his living room in downtown L.A. from floor to ceiling. “I would say I’ve probably spent minimum $10,000.”
“I’m not a collector of anything else,” he said. “But for some reason, Pop Mart got me.”
On that Friday morning in late October, more than 100 superfans had gathered outside the Pop Mart store before 9 a.m., having learned about the product drop from the brand’s social media posts.
Up for grabs: 29 large Zimomo dolls, 30 six-box blind sets of Labubu pendants and 40 Labubu purses.
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1. Labubu vinyl plush pendants on display. 2. The Century City Pop Mart store had only 40 Labubu purses for sale during an October launch. They sold out in less than an hour.
A squabble had broken out a few hours earlier over line position, store manager Henry Nguyen said, and mall security stepped in to restore order. “There was an escalation,” he said. “It was chaotic.”
Just a few days before, an Australian TikTok user posted a video from a different Pop Mart that showed hordes of shoppers waiting for the store to open, some sleeping on the ground outside the shopping center’s sliding doors overnight.
“Everyone started screaming, shoving and rushing in, and people even got crushed at the sides of the doors,” Lawrence Yu said in the video, which has been viewed 1.2 million times. “There was a group of poor Asian aunties that had all got pushed to the floor. They grazed their knees and they also snapped a few nails, too.”
I’m not a collector of anything else. But for some reason, Pop Mart got me.
— Jon Shapiro, 48, a Pop Mart superfan
The phenomenon has forced staff at each Pop Mart store to devise their own crowd control plans on the fly. To get the line in Century City moving, Nguyen decided to open an hour early, reminding customers that they were limited to one Zimomo doll ($289.99) or one complete Labubu blind set ($131.94).
Once they made it through the doors, elated shoppers grabbed blind boxes and vigorously shook them to try to discern what was inside. A mother and daughter from Inglewood filmed an unboxing video for TikTok as soon as they finished paying. The store has several Instagram group chats filled with hundreds of customers, and those on the scene posted real-time updates to let others know how many items were left.
It was all over in about an hour, with people toward the back of the line dispersing once it became clear they wouldn’t make the cutoff. Some grumbled about resellers, who sell their Labubu hauls at exorbitant markups, being among those who had swarmed the release.
Shoppers wait in line outside the Century City store in October. Some arrived as early as 2:30 a.m.
Shopping online is just as disheartening, they lamented, because of bots programmed to hoover up products the instant they’re available. The night before, the Zimomo plush sold out in less than a minute on Pop Mart’s website and TikTok Shop.
“We’re not trying to manufacture” scarcity, said Emily Brough, head of licensing for Pop Mart North America, which is headquartered in Glendale.
“It’s not like we’re just sending 12 to the store so that there’s this craze and nobody gets what they want,” she said. “We want people to get what they want, and we do try to stock up for the demand.”
Brough attributed the limited quantities to the Beijing-based company’s supply chain timeline — Pop Mart places its orders months in advance, sometimes before a particular toy has taken off. The company said it is working on strategies to make things more fair and to better manage the masses at its U.S. stores on product launch days.
Pop Mart reported record revenue of $638.5 million for the first half of 2024, a 62% increase over the same period a year earlier. Sales in its burgeoning North America segment totaled $24.9 million; more than three-fourths of its revenue comes from Southeast Asia and East Asia.
Plush toys, a hot category in the toy industry, did monster numbers: Pop Mart said revenue skyrocketed nearly 1,000% in the first half of the year, to $62.5 million. The company declined to discuss Labubu-specific sales figures or to comment on whether it was ramping up production.
Creating a viral hit is the dream for toy makers, and there is no “exact formula,” Brough said. “This is the first time that we’ve seen anything like this in North America.”
Pop Mart has benefited from some right-place-right-time luck: Its Labubu pendants double as bag charms, which have been a huge trend in the fashion world. “Kidults” — adults who are big consumers of products traditionally made for children — have been on the rise. And the organic social media love from Lisa and other celebrities was also invaluable.
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1. An employee rings up a Labubu purse for a customer. 2. The most coveted item during a recent Pop Mart launch was a large Zimomo doll for $289.99.
But more than anything, Pop Mart has mastered the hype playbook.
Collectors say they became hooked by the psychological thrill of the blind-box chase and the satisfaction of completing a set; the steady release of special collaborations and seasonal collections (a recent Halloween-themed Labubu had the elf wearing a pumpkin outfit); and the feeling of desperation that comes with wanting something in short supply.
There are also surprise, midday product drops in stores and online. That unpredictability has led people to compulsively check the stores’ Instagram Stories for news of spontaneous restocks.
Whenever one is posted, customers within quick driving or running distance descend upon the store, as they did last Thursday afternoon after the Century City Pop Mart used red siren emojis to announce it had 83 Labubus for sale: “Hot restock announcement… sales start right now.” A shopper who rushed over said everything was gone in less than 20 minutes.
They’re very limited, so that’s why you want it. You kind of crave it.
— Justine Cristobal, 34, a Labubu collector from Pico Rivera
The challenge will be to keep it going.
“The biggest problem with the industry is these things are really popular when they’re popular, and then they’re just not relevant anymore,” said Jaime Katz, an equity analyst at Morningstar. “You have to change the storyline, you have to evolve what you’re selling, you have to think about what would get consumers to make that next purchase.”
Pop Mart began as a general merchandise retailer selling third-party toys and other products. Over time, it pivoted to making designer toys, working closely with independent artists via licensing deals. The toys, which are mainly manufactured in China, found a broad audience among Gen Z.
Mega Space Molly figurines line Pop Mart’s window display in Century City. The company is known for its artist-designed collectible toys.
Hong Kong-born artist Kasing Lung is the creator of Labubu and the other Monsters creatures, which first appeared in 2015 in a series of picture books; Pop Mart began selling Labubu merchandise four years later.
Lung told The Times that he incorporated elements of his own personality into Labubu’s narrative, such as her “naughtiness,” which he believed made the character more compelling.
He realized the impish elf had become a runaway success when “one day my parents asked me for a Labubu doll,” he said. “That was the specific moment for me.”
Now, obsessed fans are showcasing them in acrylic display cases in their homes, clipping them onto their backpacks and purses, and customizing them with fake eyelashes, tiny clothes and braces.
Justine Cristobal and her partner, Marivene Del Rosario, began buying Labubu in September. In two months, they’ve spent $2,500 on 28 small plushes and three large ones, driving to Pop Marts all over Southern California twice a week and meeting other collectors in coffee shops and at their homes to swap figurines.
“Sometimes we go to different Pop Marts just to check out what they have in the same day,” said 34-year-old Cristobal, a nurse from Pico Rivera.
But the secret chestnut-cocoa Labubu — there’s only one in every 72 boxes — has eluded them.
“It’s a reason for us to buy more and then we’ll just trade the ones that we already have,” she said. “They’re very limited, so that’s why you want it. You kind of crave it.”
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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