Matt Levine, Columnist

Trump Media Discovers Nuclear Fusion

Also Tricolor, First Brands, vending machines and holiday videos.

December 18, 2025 at 6:18 PM UTC

Matt Levine is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A former investment banker at Goldman Sachs, he was a mergers and acquisitions lawyer at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; a clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit; and an editor of Dealbreaker.

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Programming note: This is the last Money Stuff of 2025. Thanks so much for reading this year, have a happy holiday season, and we’ll see you back in 2026.

Trump Media & Technology Group Corp. is an extremely successful company at something. Not media or technology: TMTG’s revenue from its various businesses (mostly Truth Social, plus some financial services stuff) is on the order of $4 million a year, roughly as much as a top Substack newsletter; for this it spends well over $100 million a year and paid its chief executive officer almost $47 million in 2024.1 If you just look at it as a business, spending $100 million a year to make $4 million a year is not a big success.