A US startup, Marathon Fusion, claimed it turned mercury into stable gold last month at ten times CERN’s record. The company said, “We've reduced alchemy to a series of difficult but tractable engineering problems.” While experts have not verified this, the firm continues building a reactor in San Francisco today.
In what could be a revolutionary development, a United States-based startup has claimed that it has turned mercury into stable gold at ten times the rate of CERN's record.
Marathon Fusion, based in San Francisco, is going viral after its unprecedented claim. It announced that it had converted mercury into stable gold last month, beating a record set by CERN tenfold. The Geneva-based organisation runs the world's largest particle physics laboratory.
The viral claim is yet to be independently verified, but has raised curiosity about whether such an invention could crash the price of gold, which is currently trading around $4,008.70 per ounce.
According to Euronews report, Marathon Fusion was founded in 2023 by Kyle Schiller and Adam Rutkowski. Rutkowski has been a former SpaceX engineer. The company is listed as a partner on the US Department of Energy website and focuses on developing fuel systems for future fusion power plants, which aim to generate electricity by fusing atoms together, similar to the sun.
The idea is not new to Marathon Fusion. In August 2025, the Atlantic shared a news report that turning mercury into gold has been on the company's agenda. At the time, their idea was to manufacture gold by tweaking atoms that were superheated during the process of nuclear fusion.
The company is backed by Breakthrough Energy, founded by Bill Gates, and Anglo American, the mining giant that owns De Beers, the world's leading natural diamond company.
In an X post, the company shared: “In 2025, we published a bold proposal to use fusion reactors for gold production. And now we've done it: Mercury transmuted into stable gold, using fusion neutrons, at 10x the record set by CERN in 2025. We've reduced alchemy to a series of difficult but tractable engineering problems.”
In 2025, CERN reported that the Large Hadron Collider, the world's most powerful particle accelerator, produced approximately 29 picograms of gold during its 2015–2018 run, equivalent to around 86 billion gold nuclei. These existed for only a fraction of a second before being destroyed in collisions with accelerator equipment.
Meanwhile, Marathon claims its fusion technology can produce gold by firing neutrons at mercury, creating an unstable isotope that decays into gold. The company also says its plasma centrifuge has broken a 40-year-old Soviet record for isotope separation. Marathon is now building a reactor in San Francisco, aiming to achieve record power density. However, its claims remain independently unverified.