Fused Objectives
Has the real purpose of fusion hype been revealed?
“Magic trick: To make people disappear, ask them to fulfill their promises.” – Mason Cooley
Newcomers to the practice of lateral thinking often encounter two significant challenges. The first is getting comfortable with its most essential premise: an axiom used for brainstorming need not be true to be useful—it only has to unlock new ways to look at the world. Unable to accept this ambiguity, skeptics dismiss downstream predictions derived from such exercises, no matter how well they explain the “true” world, even if just temporarily.
The second is accepting generalized conclusions through the philosophical constructs of zero and infinity. That neither is typically possible in a literal sense doesn’t make them less useful to ponder; understanding the asymptotic direction of travel can be incredibly insightful.
Such challenges characterized some of the feedback we received from our last written missive, “Stealth Financial Repression.” In it, we posited that the need to address burgeoning government deficits might help explain the emergence of trillion-dollar initial public offerings (IPOs), as wild step-ups in valuations create future capital gains tax obligations on an unprecedented scale. Taken to a big enough extreme—and who would argue trillion-dollar increments aren’t far from infinity—an unsolvable fiscal challenge suddenly becomes more manageable.
Might the current parade of AI-hyped giga-unicorns be a short-lived phenomenon, little more than a classic bubble blow-off top? Of course. Have all the investors in the SpaceX capital table been freed to sell their shares into the frenzy? Not yet, but some have, and there are many more to come. Will some—nay, many—wealthy investors use clever schemes to minimize capital gains taxes? No doubt, and this further reinforces the drive towards higher and higher valuations.
It may eventually turn out that these pushbacks make the mental model less useful. Time will tell. In the meantime, a model’s utility derives from its ability to explain today and predict tomorrow, and little else. It is doing the former quite fittingly, and we’ll continue to use it to do the latter until it fails.
To that end, we now return to the subject of predictions to pressure-test our new financial repression construct—and this one is a doozy. Considered through the lens of financial repression, the ongoing and highly lamentable obsession with nuclear fusion suddenly takes on new meaning, and the predictions that flow from this model will undoubtedly amuse. Let’s take a look.