![]() That examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society.Economic growth requires constant innovation in the form of new technologies, new business models, and new strategies. Despite the total void where a product should be, these companies are successfully convincing investors both big and small to part with their money. Huge sums of money have flowed into their coffers-making Theranos’ mere billion and change look like small potatoes-in return for vague, often obviously broken promises of prototypes that fail to appear despite decades of trying. Its latest “stock” sale, which happened a few months ago, raised more than $2.2 million, while suggesting to investors that it would have a functional prototype within three years.įusion companies are giving Theranos a run for its money, yet the news coverage of them seems to be almost universally uncritical. Lawrenceville Plasma Physics (founded in 2003 by a big-bang denialist) has been living crowdfund-to-mouth since 2014 when it raised about $200,000 with the promise of a working fusion machine by the year 2020. (Of course, those protections are steadily dissolving.) So it’s no surprise that the naïve investor has become a target for fusion boosters. There were some protections built into the law: Companies could only raise a certain amount of money through crowdfunding, limiting the public’s exposure to risk. But that changed about a decade ago, when Congress decided to allow ordinary citizens to invest in these companies via crowdfunding. Oh No.įor years, only “accredited” investors-people who have high incomes or net worth, and are presumed to have a decent understanding of securities trading-were allowed to invest in unregistered securities, such as stocks in a pre-IPO company. Mark Zuckerberg’s Twitter Killer Is Shockingly Viable. ![]() It Was Mortifying-but I Learned Something Important. I Confronted Someone Who Removed Me From Find My Friends. After the Titan Implosion, I Keep Thinking About What Happened Before We Launched. It’s the exact same promise, resold six years later at 200 times the price. ![]() Almost none of that coverage mentioned Helion Energy’s business plan of building “ a useful reactor in the next three years” way back in 2015, when it had only raised some $10 million. Most recently, the press went gaga in November over Helion Energy’s raising $2.2 billion in venture capital to build a working reactor by 2024. General Fusion: prototype plant within a decade-and that was in 2009. In 2016, Tokamak Energy promised energy production in five years. Yet despite the short history of purely commercial fusion, those promises already have a history of being broken. These companies are able to trade on promises, not products. Luckily for them, assurances of honorable intentions have been sufficient for investors. Nobody has demonstrated that they’re even close to building a fusion device that produces-rather than consumes-energy. Unlike Theranos, which built (terribly flawed) hardware that was used to analyze patient samples, not a single one of the nuclear fusion “startups” has produced a prototype machine that they propose to base their business upon. ![]() The fusioneers don’t really even have to fake anything.
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