One of the first things Kemmerer Mayor Robert Bowen did when TerraPower announced his city would be home to the Bill Gates-backed company's first sodium-cooled fast reactor was look for a way to invest in the company that was investing in his town.
“I wanted to try to buy the stock,” Bowen told Cowboy State Daily. “But it was all privately held. There were no public stock options.”
Bowen saw that as a “green flag” at the time for the company itself.
To him, it means the company will put its own money behind this, taking most of the risks. To do that, the people involved must believe in the viability of what they’re doing.
But the fact that TerraPower is 100% privately held also throws up a bit of red flag when it comes to an investment pitch that’s been aggressively advertised on Facebook lately, popping up in the feeds of a lot of Cowboy State residents.
The pitch, in a long-winded and very non-specific way, touts an “incredible energy breakthrough” that could put Kemmerer, Wyoming, at the center of a “once-in-a-lifetime wealth explosion and mint new millionaires across America.”
The pitch suggests that Brownstone Research has secret insight into how regular people can get in on the millions that will undoubtedly be made.
NVIDIA And Elon
The hour-long or so pitch comes from a man identifying himself in the video as Jeff Brown, founder and CEO of New York-based Brownstone Research.
At his website, Brown says he’s an investment analyst with 25 years of experience in technology at firms like Qualcomm, Juniper Networks and NXP Semiconductors.
Brown’s pitches often invoke name-brand companies like NVIDIA or highly recognized people like Elon Musk and suggest he has special insight into how regular investors might claim a stake in their latest and greatest technology moves.
That’s the case with the Kemmerer pitch as well, which implies NVIDIA may come to Kemmerer, as Brown stands in front of what is recognizable as the future site of TerraPower’s Natrium reactor, which is under construction.
In his pitch, Brown references a $650 million investment stake he says Nvidia made in the energy company he’s standing in front of. There indeed was a $650 million investment in TerraPower made by Nventures, an NVIDIA subsidiary, in June, according to a TerraPower news release.
Still standing in front of the TerraPower site in Kemmerer, Brown goes on to say, “You see this building behind me is soon to be a brand-new type of power plant. One that could fundamentally change how electricity is generated and distributed in our country.”
What follows is an hour-long suggestion that those who click on Brown’s forthcoming link and invest in his product will learn how they can become ground-floor investors in this emerging new technology that he’s standing in front of in Kemmerer.
The specific company he recommends, however, is never given during the pitch itself.
The reality is that TerraPower is a privately held company.
Any investments right now would have to be in a publicly held contractor that is doing some kind of work for TerraPower, not TerraPower itself.
Oranges To Apples
Brown goes on in his lengthy pitch to name-drop Forbes, claiming that the global media company said thecompany he’s talking about is likely to become a “go-to energy source.” Bank of America analysts, meanwhile, called it “one of the most consequential energy technologies for the next 25 years,” Brown said.
Those comments, based on a Google search by Cowboy State Daily, appear to have actually been aimed at small modular nuclear reactors, an entirely different nuclear power approach than TerraPower’s sodium-cooled fast reactor.
Brown’s pitch goes on in the same vein, making vague statements that appear to be backed up by concrete things.
“This technology is so revolutionary that there are just two of these power stations operational in the world right now, and neither of them is in America,” he says at one point, still in front of TerraPower’s Kemmerer site.
However, sodium-cooled fast reactors are actually now operational in Russia, China, and India, while Japan is operating a test site for such a facility.
Japan is also working with France on building new sodium-cooled reactors.
France has a long history of working with sodium-cooled reactors, even though the country walked away from them in 2019 over nuclear nonproliferation concerns.
Invoking Trump
Brown then mentions President Donald Trump’s Executive Oder 14301, which seeks to reform nuclear reactor testing, saying that Trump has “fast-tracked approval for 11 similar sites to the one right behind me.”
Trump’s executive order actually only mandated at least three such sites, though the Department of Energy has approved 11 under the new order.
Trump has “drawn a line in the sand for at least three of these revolutionary power stations to be operational in America by July 4, 2026, and that’s why I call this a freedom factory,” Brown continues.
Trump’s executive order does call for “achieving criticality in each of the three reactors by July 4, 2026.” But Trump’s order doesn’t mention TerraPower by name, nor specify any particular advanced nuclear reactor technology.
TerraPower’s actual timeline for the Kemmerer plant Brown is standing in front of calls for its Natrium plant to begin operating sometime in 2030, with full-blown commercial operation by 2031.
After constructing this type of framework, Brown then zeroes in on the investment opportunity as he sees it.
“As key suppliers for these freedom factories are announced, one under-the-radar company in particular could explode in value overnight,” Brown said. “Because we’re not just talking about 11 freedom factories here. This is the beginning of a huge transformation happening across our country as we speak.”
Unclear Pricing
The under-the-radar company Brown is talking about is never revealed in the pitch.
To get to that, one is encouraged to click on a link toward the end of the pitch, which takes people to a website where they can sign up for the various investment advice products that Brownstone Research offers.
The company’s monthly newsletter, which delivers investment recommendations, as well as occasional special reports on topics like self-driving cars, genetic editing and precision medicine, among many others, appears to start at $149 from the site’s webpage.
It’s not clear at the website if the $149 figure is a monthly fee or an annual fee. The price of its other products, including the all-access product, isn’t given at the website. There’s a phone number to call and talk to, presumably, a sales representative.
Reddit users familiar with Brownstone Research's products say those who sign up for the ground floor product, the $149 newsletter, will receive many emails with upsell offers.
Others commented that Brownstone Research's all-access product costs around $2,000, which they felt is pricy, but comparable to other such services.
Better Investment Advice Options
Brad Enzi, a longtime energy industry watcher in Wyoming, told Cowboy State Daily his advice on any pitches of this type is caution.
“These are the kinds of things that, like, my mom will call me about, and say, ‘Oh I heard about this thing … and for a monthly fee they’ll tell me what to do,'” Enzi said. “I think we’re in this information era where people want to sell expertise, but they’re not actually selling a service.
"This guy isn’t investing your money, so he has no liability in the deal.”
That throws up a particular red caution flag for Enzi, who suggested there are better-known entities for a service that bears no liability for its advice, among them the Motley Fool.
Motley Fool’s Stock Advisor product advertises that it’s beaten the S&P 500 by four times for the last 21 years and provides a chart showing its track record by year.
There are no claims that it’s made “1,000%” gains or anything like that.
The prices for its products are also clearly outlined on the website. The initial starting price for its ground floor newsletter is $99 a year, which goes up to $199 in the second year, or can go all the way up to $1,399 for its fanciest Cadillac plan.
Look Beyond The Hype
There is a lot of hype around nuclear energy and AI, Enzi said, and that’s bound to capture the attention of people who are looking for a place to invest some of their money.
While some of the hype may be justified, the important thing to know is that right now, much of what is happening is emergent stuff, which also means exceptionally high risk.
There are going to be some big winners, undoubtedly. There are also going to be some huge losers. And there’s no track record as yet to sort through who really has the ground-breaking, winning ideas.
“You might have just as much luck going to buy a Powerball ticket today,” Enzi said, chuckling a little bit.
Powerball has reached a $1.7 billion jackpot for the Christmas Eve drawing.
Because of the high risks involved, Enzi himself hasn’t yet invested in many nuclear entities just yet, even though he has almost two decades of experience in the energy industry and, as an economic developer for Laramie, he has been sitting in on lots of meetings that involve nuclear energy in Wyoming.
“Most of the stuff that I know about right now is kind of emerging,” Enzi said. “It’s not to the investment phase yet.”
This includes the privately held TerraPower, which is building its first plant in Kemmerer.
While the company has gone to great lengths to test its ideas and de-risk its project, that doesn’t mean there is zero risk, even with that one, even if it were somehow available for everyday investors.
“From my industry background and expertise on this, I would say that you really have to just be aware of timelines,” Enzi said. “Be aware of the permitting regulations.
"This is an emerging industry that’s going to mature much further down the path than probably what people are being told.”
No Secret Ins
Many of the best investments right now also won’t be likely to have any opportunities available to the general public.
Those kinds of ground-floor opportunities, by and large, go to private investors who have millions to invest at one time. The NVIDIA companies of the world, for example, that can plunk $650 million into an idea like TerraPower all in one fell swoop.
One rationale behind that has long been that the general public isn’t aware enough of how risky this type of angel investing really is and could potentially lose a lot of hard-earned savings if allowed to invest large amounts of money too soon.
There’s rarely a legitimate secret “in” to get around that, at least for right now.
President Trump signed an order earlier this year that directs the Department of Labor to examine ways to allow retirement plan providers to make private investments.
That could help open up new corners of Wall Street to everyday investors, giving them more opportunities to legitimately get in on the ground floor of potentially larger gains than traditional stock market investors can usually access. That work is still ongoing.
In the meantime, though, there are at least some everyday investor opportunities in the nuclear sector, particularly when it comes to the uranium mining companies that will be supplying raw materials for the emerging nuclear industry.
Investment in a uranium mining company doesn’t require figuring out which nuclear energy technology is going to be a winner and which a loser, which helps eliminate some of the risk.
For such investments, Enzi recommends looking at companies that aren’t emerging and that already have a good track record somewhere in the world, even if it’s not yet a track record in America or Wyoming.
“Just go with the known,” Enzi said. “If you go with ones that are already doing it, that’s going to be a safer place.”
Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.
