Liz’s view
Is the US now the dumb money?
Trump Media’s $6 billion merger with a nuclear energy company doesn’t even pretend to make business sense. TMTG is, to borrow Matt Taibbi’s defining phrase of another era, the vampire squid of this moment, haphazardly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. (It has been less successful than Goldman Sachs in that regard: TMTG shares are down 80% since early 2024, though Trump’s personal stake is still worth $1.2 billion.) Unlike Wall Street profit-seekers, it’s laying its own scent trail by following Trump’s favored policies — first into conservative social media, then to bitcoin, and now to nuclear energy.
The pandemic-era financial froth — SPACs, meme stocks, and crypto fever — was supposed to die with rising interest rates. Now those things look almost charming. The inanity and nihilism is still there, but tinged with something darker and more permanent, a sense that the rules of capitalism changed. As my colleague Rachyl Jones reported this week, critical minerals and nuclear energy companies are embracing SPACs in the hopes of catching Trump’s eye and bagging a government investment. The nuclear startup, TAE, is merging with TMTG not because there’s an obvious tie between fusion and all-caps threads, but because of the Trump firm’s “access to significant capital.”
American capitalism is losing its way even as other countries are moving away from suboptimal and clunky state-run economies. Gulf countries are professionalizing their investments and no longer want to be the world’s dumb money. Japan is forcing sleepy conglomerates, whose structures protected the elite, to slim down and compete.
Meanwhile, the world’s leading democracy is starting to look like a family office with a meme hobby.
Notable
- TMTG is more successful at selling stock than as a traditional business, Bloomberg’s Matt Levine notes. “Now, everyone understands that selling stock at a high valuation is a separate and valuable skill … Once you accept this model, there are trades to be done. If you have a promising business, and I have a high stock price, maybe we can team up.”