"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Arthur C. Clarke

For more than a millennium, alchemists have tinkered in their labs trying to turn base metals into gold. While CERN has already done that, albeit at a minuscule scale, a San Francisco startup claims it has beaten that achievement.

Marathon Fusion, backed by Bill Gates' Breakthrough Energy, the U.S. Department of Energy's ARPA-E, and Anglo American plc (OTC:NGLOY), said it turned "mercury into real, stable gold, beating CERN's record by a factor of 10," Euronews reported.

The claim hasn't been verified. It still fueled chatter, especially among Bitcoiners, that lab-made bullion could do to gold what synthetic stones did to diamonds.

The method fires fusion neutrons at enriched mercury-198, which has 80 protons, creating unstable mercury-197. That isotope decays over about 64 hours into stable gold-197, which has 79 protons. Marathon's goal isn't to flood the market; it's to monetize its neutrons by selling medical isotopes and gold to help pay for costly fusion plants.

The Diamond Parallel Limitations

"This is another golden asteroid story," Lobo Tiggre, CEO of Independent Speculator, told Michelle Makori in an interview.

"For an investor today, this is a complete non-issue." He said gold's recent pullback reflects fears of Federal Reserve rate hikes and Middle East conflict.

After factories learned to grow identical diamonds in weeks, wholesale lab-grown prices fell 90% to 96%, according to analyst Paul Zimnisky. De Beers shut its Lightbox brand in 2025 amid a $511 million loss, and Anglo American is in talks to sell its 85% stake. Arguably, diamonds are the only hated commodity right now.

Tiggre rejected the idea that buyers would pay a premium for "natural" gold. "It's a metal. It's an element," he said, noting that young buyers embraced ethical lab-grown stones.

If gold became "as easily obtainable as aluminum," he said, "I would sell."

Still, gold has defenses diamonds lacked. Roughly 97% of the 222,600 tons ever mined sits in vaults and jewelry, and annual mine supply of 3,672 tons has no bearing on gold's dollar price, Tiggre said.

Raw material is another wall. Natural mercury contains only 10% mercury-198 and must be enriched to about 90%. Karl Lackner, Emeritus of the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics, called that process technically demanding.

Enriched mercury-198 costs about $15,000 a milligram, Makori said, compared with roughly $135 a gram for gold.

By Lackner's estimates, converting stored mercury waste would yield just 20 tons a year, moving prices less than 1%. Transmuting all the mercury in Earth's crust would cap out near 600 tons a year.

Extraordinary Claims Need Extraordinary Evidence

Citing his physics studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Tiggre compared Marathon's paper, which isn't peer-reviewed, and its two-minute video to a "fly-by-night" junior explorer touting pathfinder elements without assays. He added that the company hasn't said whether it produced any gold at all.

"You need extraordinary evidence," he said. "And what we've got is a YouTube video."

Going from a 1-kilowatt testbed to a gigawatt plant that doesn't exist yet could take decades. Makori noted the gold could stay radioactive for 14 to 18 years before it can be legally sold.

"It'd be much easier to just filter seawater." Investors, Tiggre added, "will see this coming miles away."

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