The unverified assertion revives an alchemist’s dream and a market paranoia that lab-created gold could do to bullion what lab-grown precious stones did to diamonds. Founded in 2023 by Kyle Schiller and Adam Rutkowski, a former SpaceX engineer, Marathon builds fuel systems for future fusion power plants that would generate electricity by fusing atoms together like the sun. Its website lists the US Department of Energy as a collaborator and it obtained a 2023 award from ARPA-E, the department’s high-risk energy research organization.
In 2025, CERN stated its Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, had created around 29 picograms, or 29 trillionths of a gram, of gold in its 2015–2018 run. That was almost 86 billion gold nuclei, or atomic cores, that lived only a tiny fraction of a second before collisions with the accelerator equipment annihilated them.
Marathon’s technique is to shoot neutrons from fusion processes at mercury, rendering it an unstable isotope, or form of the metal, that decays into gold. It also says its plasma centrifuge has smashed a 40-year-old Soviet record, a gadget that spins electrically charged gas at high speed to separate isotopes needed for fusion fuel.
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