If you’ve read some of the bombastic headlines across the country, you might have shouted, “Eureka!”
Because they’ve done it, folks. The mad scientists have done it! They have achieved something that humans have wanted to do for thousands of years: They have transformed worthless metal into real, valuable gold.
I’m telling “Come and Take It” readers who are gold investors to relax. Pour a rye whiskey, or put on some tunes (I recommend Sierra Ferrell’s “Pair of Dice.”) Then, take a look at the straight facts with me.
This story isn’t really that new. For over 2,000 years, alchemists again and again swore to kings in Asia, Europe, and Africa that they could use a chemical formula to transform lead into gold.
Not one of them ever ultimately delivered. Like good politicians, though, most of them got rich anyway… on the kings’ dime.
Is this really any different? A San Francisco startup has grabbed headlines in the past few weeks with wild claims that they finally made the breakthrough.
Marathon Fusion claimed on X on Oct. 21 that it had turned mercury into “real, stable gold.” Within hours, Wall Street and CNBC talking heads were asking if gold investments could go the way of diamonds, whose prices collapsed once we learned to grow them in a lab.
If you hold gold and silver, you may have felt a chill up your spine. But don’t grab your shovels to go dig up your stockpile of gold buried in the backyard quite yet.
It simply spells out a familiar story: alchemists making huge, impossible claims… while trying to get rich in the king’s court.
An Insane Claim...With Zero Numbers Attached
Marathon Fusion was founded in 2023 by Kyle Schiller and Adam Rutkowski, a former SpaceX engineer. Its real business is trying to build fuel systems for future fusion power plants.
Gold is a lucky byproduct of their attempts.
Here’s how it works, according to them: A fusion reaction creates neutrons which are fired into mercury, which creates an unstable isotope.
Then, it turns out that this isotope decays. But not into dirt… it turns into gold.
Eyebrow-raising for sure. On a podcast, Schiller said that if things go well, the company “might double global gold production.”
Take note: Marathon didn’t say how much gold it made. It didn’t say what it cost to make it, or how much energy was used. It shared none of the experimental data, and the rest of its announcement was mostly about medical isotopes. The claim has not been independently verified.
I’m not saying their science isn’t real. Truth be told, nuclear fusion goes over my head a bit. But I do know that in 1980 – 46 years ago -- Nobel Prize winner Glenn Seaborg successfully turned bismuth-209 into gold using a particle accelerator. Scientists have known for decades that you can create gold.
Bismuth is neat looking, too.
But the real question has always been: Can you make gold cheaper to buy than it costs someone to dig it out of the ground?
Diamonds Are Shiny Rocks. Gold Is Not.
We know lab-grown diamonds really did wreck that market. Wholesale prices for lab-grown stones have crashed 90% to 95% since 2015, and they dragged real mined diamond prices down with them.
De Beers, the company that once told the world “a diamond is forever,” has lost millions.
But a diamond is just carbon that has been mushed down really, really small. Carbon is everywhere. Factories squeeze it under heat and pressure, and out comes a shiny stone that impresses almost all ladies.
Gold, however, is an element on the periodic table. You can’t squeeze it out of anything. To make a single gold atom, you have to change the inside of a nucleus of a different atom. That takes a particle accelerator, a nuclear reactor, or divine intervention.
That’s the total list of options… a massive difference.
According to the World Gold Council, humanity has mined an estimated 222,600 tons of gold throughout our history. Almost all of it still exists in various forms. It’s sitting in vaults, central banks, and your wife’s jewelry box.
Marathon’s 2025 study said a fusion energy plant - if viable - could produce about 5 tons of gold a year. Build 100 fusion energy plants, and you’d add roughly 500 tons a year.
That sounds like a lot… until you do the math. That’s only about 0.2% of the gold already above ground.
Gold’s value rests on 5,000 years of mining that nobody is throwing away.
A few reactors, even if they’re cost-efficient, simply can’t flood a market that big.
A Long, Long Road to the Gold Counter
“Even if they’re cost-efficient” is a key part of that last line. Because those 100 fusion plants are pure science fiction today.
Marathon’s website lists its current reactor at 1 kilowatt of fusion power. That’s 1/1,000,000 of a gigawatt. To reach the viable plant size its own study assumes, the company would have to scale up a million times over.
Then there’s the radiation.
Freshly made fusion gold is loaded with radioactive isotopes. Marathon’s paper says it would need to sit in storage for 7 to 17 years, depending on the safety standard, before anyone could sell it.
So run the clock. Years to build a working commercial fusion plant. More years to build enough of them to matter. Then about 17 more years with the gold locked in a vault, too deadly to touch.
We’re talking about the 2040s or 2050s, at the earliest, before the first fusion gold could even show up in the market.
Even on the fastest timeline anyone can sketch, the gold has to come out of the hundreds of reactors.
Those reactors simply don’t exist.
The Real Money Printer Is in Washington
None of this means gold is a guaranteed bet. It isn’t. Nothing is.
Gold hit a record $5,598 an ounce in January, but has since coughed up about a quarter of that value. It traded near $4,000 late last month. But a price swing is not the same thing as a diamond-style collapse.
If you’re worried about something diluting the value of what you own, look at the real numbers side by side.
Fusion power plants aren’t going to be printing money. That’s the job of crooked politicians in Washington, D.C.
The world’s gold supply grows by about 1.6% a year from mining.
The U.S. national debt grew by $2.39 trillion over the past twelve months, and is over $40 trillion. That’s a jump of over 6% in a single year.
The U.S. debt grew by over $6.5 billion today. It will grow by $6.5 billion more tomorrow..
No fusion reactor is required. No 17-year cooling-off period. Just a keystroke at the Treasury. Poof, there’s another $6.5 billion in debt the next day.
And once Democrats are firmly in control in January, just imagine the carnage.
As I wrote previously, the Blue Wave midterm elections just set up a collision course between Democrats and President Donald Trump over government funding and the debt limit sometime in 2027. That bill is coming due long before the first ounce of fusion gold could ever leave its radioactive vault.
The alchemists of the Dark Ages didn’t need to make real gold to get themselves rich, they just needed dopes who wanted to believe they could get something for nothing.
Politicians and unelected bureaucrats in Washington have been running the same con for decades. They just call it “deficit spending.”
That’s why I hold only things I can touch. Real estate. Gold. Silver. Oil. Cattle. Mines. Land.
None of it can be printed, and none of it can be grown in a lab overnight.
And if someone else wants it… they can come and take it.
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byUnited States Gold Bureau