Trump Connections a Plus for Nuclear Startups

Better to be “anti-woke” than experienced or competent.

Washington Post reporting suggests that nuclear’s long term problems may be exacerbated by Trump Administration incompetence, corruption and good-ol-boy logrolling.
Kind of a “holy shit” light bulb moment of an article.

Washington Post (gift link):

The fledgling Texas company Fermi America has yet to produce an electron, split an atom or survive the torturous gantlet of regulatory and manufacturing obstacles required to build a nuclear reactor.

But investors are betting big that the Trump administration will help Fermi turn from a glossy, aspirational marketing brochure into a cutting-edge nuclear operation to meet the rapacious energy needs of AI data centers. So much so that they catapulted its founders into the ranks of the world’s richest men a few months after Fermi filed paperworkwith regulators to build the “Donald J. Trump Advanced Energy and Intelligence Campus.”

Typically, a company’s revenue, track record and market advantage drive valuations. But in the age of President Donald Trump’s promised nuclear revival, shareholders and backers see connections to the White House as the road to profitability, investment analysts and longtime industry insiders say.

Fermi was founded by three men: Rick Perry, who served as Texas governor and was U.S. energy secretary during Trump’s first term;Perry’s investor son; and the son of a former Texas congressman celebrated by the right when he founded an “anti-woke” bank that later failed.

“If you or I launched the same business, our valuation would be zero,” said Raphaëlle d’Ornano, whose firm Decoding Discontinuity advises investors on AI-related start-ups.

Fermi’s corporate blueprint, d’Ornano said, essentially signals to investors “we have no proven execution capabilities in this field but what we do have is a team of politically connected people who make us believe attaining the needed regulatory clearance should not be too much of a problem.”

Fermi is not an outlier. Other Trump-connected companies with untested business plans are brimming with cash infusions and winning regulators’ favor.

They include advanced reactor developer Oklo, where Energy Secretary Chris Wright was a board member; General Matter, a uranium enrichment start-up where former Trump megadonor and adviser Peter Thiel is a board director and funder; and Valar Atomics, a small California reactor company backed by major Trump donor Palmer Luckey and Shyam Sankar, the chief technology officer of Palantir Technologies, a firm closely aligned with the White House. Some of the companies are leapfrogging past far more seasoned firms.

“They assume there is something shiny, new and fancy just waiting for a Steve Jobs of nuclear,” said Chris Keefer, co-founder of Canadians for Nuclear Energy. “It is creating valuations that are probably wildly out of touch with what these companies are capable of.”

Energy Department officials said nuclear approvals are subject to rigorous regulatory review. They referred questions about the firms’ political connections to the White House, which declined to answer them.

These firms are far from the only ones working on advances in nuclear power. BWXT, a longtime military contractor, is developing new small commercial reactors. Industry leader Westinghouse recently signed an $80 billion deal with the Trump administration to build large legacy reactors across the nation. Even relative newcomer TerraPower, an advanced reactor firm founded by Bill Gates, is further along than other start-ups, having broken ground for a commercial plant in Wyoming.

The start-ups chafe at the characterization that they’re merely trading on connections.

“Ask the world’s leading investors and potential customers who watch our site via satellite, and they will tell you they marvel at what we’ve already accomplished,” Fermi CEO Toby Neugebauer, son of former congressman Randy Neugebauer (R-Texas), said in an interview.

Neugebauer, a GOP megadonor who lives in a home styled after the White House, is referring to a large patch of land near Amarillo where the company hopes to have reactors operating by 2032, a timeline experts say is unheard of, and has already started building gas plants to generate additional power.

He said he has hired highly accomplished nuclear executives and argued that some of the nation’s most complicated energy undertakings were launched by small groups of entrepreneurs.

The combined net worth on paper of Toby Neugebauer and his father — a major investor in Fermi — surged to $5 billion when he and the Perrys took their company public nine months after forming it. Griffin Perry, the son of the former Texas governor, saw his net worth grow to $2 billion, according to Forbes. Their fortunes have since fluctuated with the stock price.

Oklo is another darling of Wall Street speculators, despite zero revenue and no licensed reactors. Its effort to license a new form of nuclear energy technology failed during the Biden administration.

After Trump invited Oklo co-founder Jacob DeWitte to join him in the Oval Office for the signing of executive orders boosting companies developing advanced reactors, the firm’s stock surged.
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There is much, much more, gift link here.