Oklo: Cool idea for N-power
Connoisseurs of a truly frothy valuation will raise an approving glass towards Oklo, a nuclear technology start-up that has seen its share price explode by over 500% this year to value the company at more than $20bn.
It may not have much, or indeed anything, in the way of revenue or binding contracts with potential customers, but it does have connections, with OpenAI’s Sam Altman serving as its chair until he stepped down in April, while US energy secretary Chris Wright is a former board member.
In May US President Donald Trump invited Oklo CEO Jacob deWitte to the White House for an event at which he delivered the heartening news that he intended to quadruple US nuclear capacity by 2050. Since then, Oklo has been handed multiple projects by the department of energy.
Oklo was one of four firms chosen for the department’s advanced nuclear fuel-line pilot projects and scored three out of 11 projects under its reactor pilot programme, leading some to suggest that in Trump’s America it doesn’t hurt to have friends in high places.
It’s not exactly breaking news that the boom in AI is going to need enormous amounts of energy to drive its data centres, and Oklo is developing small modular reactors that use liquid sodium instead of water as a coolant.
In 2022 the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission turned down Oklo’s application to build a sodium-cooled reactor, and the technology required to make these reactors commercially viable at scale is a long way from proven, but Oklo and its army of retail investors remain hopeful.
Porsche: Consciously crashing
Porsche’s 911 has been named Germany’s most reliable car by its Technischer Überwachungsverein (Association for Technical Inspection), and the company had appeared similarly trustworthy until the most recent quarter, where it appears to have driven full tilt into a brick wall.
In the third quarter, Porsche reported a loss of €967m compared with an operating profit of €974m the previous year. The company says it is “consciously accepting temporarily weaker key figures to strengthen profitability and resilience in the long term”.
The message, when translated from the original German, appears to be to take everything on the chin in one absolute howler of a quarter, replace the CEO, and move forward into the broad, sunlit uplands of an altogether happier 2026.
The company booked extraordinary expenses of about €2.7bn as it shifted its focus back to petrol and hybrid models as a reaction to lower than expected demand for electric vehicles. This included a €1.8bn charge for shelving a new electric SUV.
Sales in China dropped by 26% in the first nine months of the year, while in the US they were up 5% to record levels, which may have something to do with customers hurrying to get their purchase in before Trump’s tariff regime comes to bite them in the wallet.
With no manufacturing facilities in the US, Porsche will be facing tariffs across the range, and it estimates the cost will be somewhere in the “three-digit million range”.
It has been a quarter to forget, but Porsche remains a high-quality operation with an excellent product line, and it shouldn’t be long before it returns to form.
