As Fermi Falters, Insiders Are Dumping Millions Of Shares
The startup co-founded by Rick Perry promised to generate loads of juice for AI. So far, it’s only enriching a few insiders.
Long before Zig Ziglar, Gary Vaynerchuk, Tony Robbins, and other motivational gurus, there was Elmer Wheeler.
Wheeler was known as “America’s No. 1 Salesman.” His most famous dictum was: “Don’t sell the steak, sell the sizzle. It’s the sizzle that sells the steak, and not the cow.” Wheeler also created “Sizzle Labs” to help determine which word combinations were most effective in sales. The sizzle, Wheeler declared, “is the tang in the cheese, the crunch in the cracker, the whiff in the coffee.”
Last fall, Fermi Inc., a startup co-founded by former Texas governor and Energy Secretary Rick Perry, was sizzling. Perry’s name, pedigree, and position as a co-founder and board member, brought significant media attention to the company. Fermi’s founders claimed it would build more than 11 gigawatts of power generation capacity on a site near Amarillo dubbed Project Matador, and become the go-to destination for a massive collection of data centers. Fermi claimed it would build gas-fired generators, small modular reactors, and four AP1000 nuclear reactors, with the first one becoming operational by 2031. It also dubbed the 6,000-acre site the “President Donald J. Trump Advanced Energy and Intelligence Campus.”
On October 1, Fermi went public in a transaction that allowed the company to raise nearly $746 million. A day later, one analyst told Reuters that Fermi’s IPO “speaks to the gold rush happening in AI infrastructure right now. It’s a cash geyser.” It certainly looked like a geyser. At the time of the IPO, Rick Perry’s shares in Fermi were worth $540 million, and his son, Griffin Perry, had a stake valued at $2.3 billion.
But Fermi’s sizzle has turned to fizzle.
Since the IPO, the company’s stock price has dropped by nearly 84%. Shares that peaked at nearly $37 were trading yesterday for $5.28.
On March 30, the company reported its 2025 financial results, and they were ugly. Fermi reported a full-year loss of $486.4 million, which included some $177.8 million in general and administrative expenses, $173.8 million in charitable expenses, $132.7 million in share-based compensation, and $111.6 million in losses related to financing.
The losses are the latest in a string of bad news for Fermi. On December 12, the company reported that its first prospective tenant had terminated a $150 million Advance in Aid of Construction agreement. The prospective tenant was never named. Within weeks, class-action law firms announced they were suing Fermi. In a January 7 press release, one firm claimed that “Fermi overstated tenant demand for Project Matador and misrepresented the agreement with the First Tenant.” Another firm alleges that Fermi’s “positive statements about its business, operations, and prospects were misleading and lacked a reasonable basis from the IPO onward, and that the registration statement contained material misrepresentations.” Yet another firm claims “Fermi’s IPO registration statement inflated the actual demand for Project Matador’s multi-gigawatt capacity to attract high-valuation multiples.”
Given these facts, it may not be surprising that some Fermi insiders, including one of the company’s founders, are selling significant amounts of their stock. Let’s take a look.
