MIT Couple Behind Nuclear Fission Company Are Now Billionaires Thanks To AI Hype

The shares of 12-year-old nuclear fission company Oklo are up 47% over the last week and more than 400% over the past six months, thanks to excitement around the potential for nuclear energy to power the AI boom. The most recent jump comes after the U.S. and U.K. governments signed an agreement last Thursday to invest some $350 billion (flowing both ways) into AI, quantum computing and nuclear energy; despite the jump, it’s not yet clear the nuclear deals will benefit Oklo directly. The Santa Clara-based company also broke ground on its first nuclear power plant, at the Department of Energy-controlled Idaho National Laboratory on Monday. As of market close, Oklo’s market cap sits at $21 billion.

Oklo’s runup makes husband-and-wife cofounders Jacob DeWitte, who is CEO, and Caroline Cochran, who is chief operating officer, new billionaires. The couple founded the company in 2013, while DeWitte was a PhD student at MIT studying nuclear engineering. Cochran, who graduated from MIT with a masters degree in nuclear engineering in 2010, had just completed a stint as a marketing and engineering consultant. The name came from the uranium-rich mineral deposits at Oklo, Gabon, renowned for having undergone self-sustained fission two billion years ago. Each founder is now worth $1.7 billion, per Forbes estimates, based on their combined 16% stake in Oklo and approximately $30 million from share sales. Cochran, who is 42, is one of just three dozen self-made women billionaires in the U.S., and one of just six under 50.

Despite its soaring stock and the fact that it just broke ground on its first power plant, the company has yet to generate any revenue and is still losing money, roughly $25 million in the second quarter and $55 million for the year ending in June.

What it does have is a longtime relationship with Secretary of Energy Chris Wright who served on Oklo’s board until he was confirmed to the government position in February. That in turn has likely helped secure the apparent blessing of Donald Trump. “The market needs this and wants this. Nuclear is a manifestation of energy dominance,” DeWitte told President Trump in the Oval Office in May where Trump signed executive orders to fast-track nuclear development. The Department of Energy has since pushed an aggressive timetable for three new small-scale nuclear reactor designs to achieve first criticality by July 4, 2026. (Oklo’s relationship with the government hasn’t always been sunny: in 2022, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission rejected Oklo’s reactor application in part because Oklo didn’t share enough information about its reactor with the NRC. Now at a time when the DOE is looking to support nuclear startups as energy alternatives, Oklo has the federal support it needs. It’s now participating in a pilot program with the DOE born out of Trump’s May executive orders. Oklo did not respond to a request for comment before publication.

Oklo also has strong ties to Sam Altman, who cofounded and co-led AltC, the SPAC that took Oklo public last year. Altman also served as Oklo’s board chair from 2015 to April, when he stepped down—perhaps to make it easier for Oklo and OpenAI to pursue a deal “as Oklo explores strategic partnerships to deploy clean energy at scale, particularly to enable the deployment of AI,” Altman wrote in a statement. Altman is also a big shareholder, owning an estimated $880 million stake, most of which came from his buying founder shares in AltC for $0.002 per share back in 2021. That’s a more-than 70,000x return on investment, perhaps even his best yet. Also involved in AltC was OpenAI’s chief operating officer Brad Lightcap, though it’s unclear if he still has a role in Oklo.

Oklo’s long-term aim is to generate nuclear energy via fast fission power plants—which use faster-moving neutrons to split atomic nuclei and thus generate energy, rather than the conventional reactors that use slower neutrons and, often, water—that it plans to design, own, build and operate itself. Oklo is also focusing on small-scale reactors, which the Department of Energy has touted as more capital-efficient and flexible but critics who want more research done say could generate more waste. Once commercially viable, assuming it ever is, Oklo hopes to sell the power directly to consumers through power purchase agreements, rather than to large utilities (the more common model). Oklo’s losses will likely continue, as its goal is to get a plant online by the end of the decade. It also has not entered into a “binding contract with any customer to operate a plant or deliver electricity or heat,” per Oklo’s regulatory filings. To finance it all, Oklo is in the process of raising up to $1 billion in additional capital.

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Even within Oklo’s experimental space, there’s ample competition including Bill Gates-backed TerraPower, Amazon-backed X-energy and Kairos Power, which signed a contract with Google in 2024. Another startup, Aalo Atomics, has broken ground on a new reactor site in Utah and says its sodium cooled reactor will be done next year. Oklo, which has no big tech company behind it yet (though obvious ties to OpenAI), will likely have to compete for contracts from their backers, since smaller companies won’t have the budget to buy experimental nuclear power directly from a company. “If [we’re] buying nuclear power, it’s coming from grid mix,” says cloud computing firm CoreWeave’s chief strategy officer Brian Venturo. “We don’t have the balance sheet to go out and screw that up a few times.”

Even Oklo’s closest tech ally, Altman, seems to have hedged his bets. His biggest known bet is nuclear fusion startup Helion, into which he poured a reported $375 million in 2021, a large chunk of his liquid capital at that time; OpenAI was reportedly in talks to buy “vast” amounts of nuclear power from Helion, which finished its Polaris prototype in 2024 and expects to deliver pre-purchased electricity to Microsoft as soon as 2028.

Oklo is not the only billionaire-backed SPAC merger that has found its way to a billion-dollar market cap with no revenue. Self-driving car company Aurora Innovation merged with a SPAC backed by billionaires Reid Hoffman and Mark Pincus and went public in a $13 billion deal in 2021. Aurora’s market capitalization is now around $11 billion, despite reporting no revenue in 2024. Cofounded by Brett Adcock, the billionaire behind Figure AI,and seeded by billionaire Marc Lore, Archer Aviation, which makes electricity-powered aircraft that take off and land vertically, went public in 2021 via a SPAC. Lore has since cashed out of Archer (now worth around $6 billion).

Still, despite its lack of revenue, it has many fans. More than two-thirds of the Wall Street analysts who cover the stock rate it as a buy while 90% of retail investors hold a long position. The investor enthusiasm around Oklo as well as a stronger market for IPOs could pave the way for other nuclear startups to go public, too. But there’s reason to be cautious as competition heats up and revenues are still likely years away.