Let me tell you something most investors still refuse to believe.
The energy problem — the one that’s been hanging over civilization for a century — may be solved within the next decade. Not by solar panels. Not by wind farms. Not by some incremental improvement on existing technology.
By nuclear fusion.
I know what you’re thinking. Fusion has been “20 years away” for the past 60 years. I thought the same thing.
I dismissed it. I moved on. And then, somewhere between reading about a lab in California producing more energy than it consumed for the first time in human history, and watching Sam Altman pour over a billion dollars of his personal money into a single fusion startup, I stopped dismissing it.
And I started building a playbook. That was over a year ago. What you’re reading today is the result of more than twelve months of research, conversations, dead ends, revised assumptions, and — finally — a framework I’m confident enough to publish and stake part of my own portfolio on.
I’ll be updating it regularly as the technology matures, as companies hit milestones, and as the investment landscape shifts. This isn’t a one-time piece. It’s a living document for Macro Notes readers.
Before we get into the money, let me give you a sense of just how big this is.
Stephen Hawking once said: “I would like nuclear fusion to become a practical power source. It would provide an inexhaustible supply of energy, without pollution or global warming.” Carl Sagan put it more poetically: “When we look up at night and view the stars, everything we see is shining because of distant nuclear fusion.”
Every star in the night sky. Every single one. Running on the same reaction we are now — finally, after eighty years of trying — learning to control on Earth.
Here’s the physics in one sentence: fusion takes two light hydrogen atoms, forces them together under extreme heat and pressure, and they merge — releasing an enormous burst of energy in the process.
No carbon emissions. No long-lived radioactive waste. Fuel derived from seawater and lithium, both effectively limitless. The engineering challenge has always been containment: how do you recreate the core of a star inside a machine that fits inside a building?
For decades, the answer was: you can’t.
Here’s something most people don’t know. Robert Oppenheimer — the man who built the atomic bomb, the man who watched the first nuclear explosion in the New Mexico desert and thought of the Bhagavad Gita, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds” — was also one of the first scientists to seriously investigate nuclear fusion. The 1942 meeting he convened at Berkeley, gathering what he called his “galaxy of luminaries” — Teller, Bethe, Konopinski — laid the theoretical groundwork for both the hydrogen bomb and, indirectly, for everything that follows today.
Fission split the atom and changed the world. Fusion, which Oppenheimer understood to be the far greater force, remained just out of reach.
Until now.
In July 1945, Oppenheimer stood in the desert and watched a fireball rise into the sky. Decades later, in December 2022, a team at the National Ignition Facility in California watched something different: a fusion reaction produce more energy than the lasers used to ignite it. Net energy gain.
For the first time in history. It wasn’t a fireball. It was a blip on a screen — but the implications carried the same world-altering weight. We knew the world would not be the same, Oppenheimer once said of Trinity. The physicists in that California lab understood the feeling.
And unlike the bomb, this one points toward creation, not destruction.
Since that December 2022 moment, the progress has been relentless and largely ignored by mainstream financial media.
By April 2025, the same facility was producing 8.6 megajoules from just 2.08 megajoules of laser input — more than four times the energy return of that first historic experiment.
China’s EAST reactor sustained plasma at 100 million degrees Celsius — six times hotter than the core of the sun — for over 1,000 consecutive seconds.
France’s WEST facility held it for 1,337 seconds. South Korea hit the 100 million degree mark for 48 seconds in high-confinement mode.
These aren’t theoretical milestones. They’re engineering benchmarks, each one moving the goalposts closer to commercial reality, each one representing thousands of scientists who spent entire careers on problems that looked unsolvable.
The private sector noticed.
Total funding for the fusion industry has surged from $1.7 billion in 2020 to $15 billion as of late 2025. That’s not lab money disappearing into bureaucratic sinkholes.
That’s venture capital, sovereign wealth funds, and hard-nosed industrial giants placing very large, very deliberate bets. Chevron, Siemens Energy, Nucor, Google, Microsoft — companies with zero tolerance for fantasy and every incentive to be right — have all moved directly into the sector.
Commonwealth Fusion Systems, a spinout from MIT, has raised nearly $3 billion and counts Nvidia and Google among its backers.
Helion, backed by Sam Altman and SoftBank, has a signed contract to supply Microsoft with fusion electricity starting in 2028. Pacific Fusion emerged from stealth in late 2024 with a $900 million Series A — one of the largest first-round raises in energy history.
These are not people who invest in science fiction.
Now here’s where it gets interesting for us as investors. And this is the part that took me the longest to figure out.
The obvious trade is simple: find the companies building fusion reactors and buy exposure. But that’s not actually how I’m playing this — at least not entirely. Because if you’ve followed my work on infrastructure monopolies and supply chain bottlenecks, you already know how I think about these things. The biggest returns rarely go to the people building the thing. They go to the people who control what the thing cannot be built without.
Think about the early internet. The fortunes weren’t made by the websites. They were made by the companies laying the fiber, manufacturing the routers, producing the chips. The websites came and went. The infrastructure endured.
Fusion is setting up the same dynamic — and most investors are completely blind to it.
Here’s what I mean. The dominant approach to fusion — magnetic confinement — requires superconducting magnets generating fields of 20 tesla or more. For context, a hospital MRI machine runs at 1.5 to 3 tesla. These magnets are built using a specialized material called REBCO tape — rare-earth barium copper oxide. Today, the global market for this material is small. It’s driven almost entirely by research facilities and a handful of early prototype reactors. The suppliers who produce it are quiet, under-covered, and in several cases effectively monopolistic in their niche.
Now imagine what happens when the first commercial reactors go into production. Then the second wave. Then the global buildout. The demand curve for these materials doesn’t increase gradually — it goes vertical. And the companies sitting on the supply don’t need to build a reactor. They just need to keep doing what they’re already doing, at scale.
That’s one layer of the thesis. There are others — different materials, different components, different chokepoints — each one representing a company that is already quietly benefiting from research-stage demand, and that will be absolutely essential when fusion moves from the laboratory to the grid.
My playbook is built around two parallel tracks. The first is direct exposure to the companies most likely to win the fusion race itself — or to be acquired by someone who does. The second is the raw material layer: the quiet monopolies that supply the inputs fusion cannot function without, positioned long before the mass market figures out they exist.
The window to enter the second track, in particular, is narrow. Once the first commercial reactors are announced and the buildout timeline becomes clear, these stocks will reprice fast. By the time the story is obvious, the trade is over.
Below the paywall, I walk through the full playbook — every layer, every name, every position:
The three-tier investment structure — how I think about fusion exposure across speculative, mid-risk, and defensive positions, and how I size each
The reactor builders — the publicly traded proxies for the companies writing the future of energy, and what their valuations actually imply today
The raw material monopolies — the under-the-radar suppliers of critical fusion inputs who are already seeing demand, and who face a demand cliff when commercial production begins
The wildcard — a December 2025 development that created the first publicly traded pure-play fusion vehicle, and my honest assessment of whether it belongs in a serious portfolio
My actual allocation — the exact structure I use, the sizing logic, and the time horizon I’m working with
I’ll also be updating this playbook regularly.
As companies hit technical milestones, as IPO timelines crystallize, and as the supply chain picture becomes clearer, Macro Notes subscribers will get every revision directly in their inbox.
If fusion delivers even a fraction of what the physics suggests it can, this is the single largest energy investment opportunity of our lifetimes.
The question isn’t whether to have exposure.
The question is how to structure it so you’re not gambling — you’re positioning….
🔒 The Nuclear Fusion Playbook
Before I name a single stock, I want to explain how I think about this trade.
Because if you approach fusion the way most investors approach it — hunting for the…