Oklo’s Other Enrichment Cycle
Oklo Inc. boasts bold promises and powerful backers. But over the past 15 months, its co-founders have sold hundreds of millions of dollars of their stock.
Last May, President Donald Trump signed a series of executive orders designed to accelerate the development and deployment of nuclear energy in the US. As I explained at the time, those orders were “the most consequential endorsements of nuclear energy by a US president since Dwight Eisenhower delivered his Atoms For Peace speech in 1953.”
The signings were held during a splashy press event in the Oval Office, which included Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and Oklo Inc. CEO Jacob DeWitte. During a brief discussion with Trump about electricity demand, DeWitte declared that nuclear energy is “a perfect solution” for the power needs of AI and data centers.
The event was a public relations coup for Oklo, which is arguably the buzziest of the publicly traded small modular reactor (SMR) companies. Indeed, California-based Oklo got enormous amounts of positive press coverage in the years leading up to the Oval Office event. The company garnered early backing from Austin-based Trust Ventures, which specializes in funding companies seeking to break into heavily regulated sectors of the economy. In 2020, Oklo became the first company in a decade to submit an application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to build and operate a nuclear reactor.
Also in 2020, I interviewed Oklo’s co-founder, Caroline Cochran, on the Power Hungry Podcast. (See above.) Cochran is Oklo’s chief operating officer and is also married to DeWitte.
Oklo went public in May 2024 via a SPAC backed by Sam Altman, the CEO and founder of OpenAI, and Altman was named chairman of Oklo’s board of directors. Five months later, Denver-based Liberty Energy, which was co-founded by Chris Wright, invested $10 million in Oklo. Wright served on Oklo’s board from May 2024 until February of 2025, when he was confirmed by the Senate to be Secretary of Energy.
In September 2025, the company broke ground at Idaho National Laboratory on its first reactor project. About a month later, the company’s stock hit an all-time high of about $174 per share. In January, Meta (Facebook) announced a deal with Vistra, Oklo, and TerraPower to supply the tech giant with up to 6.6 GW of nuclear power by 2035. Oklo said that its part of the deal includes “plans to develop a 1.2 GW power campus” in Ohio to power Meta’s data centers in the region, and that it aims to “deliver up to the full target of 1.2 GW by 2034.”
Although its stock price has plummeted over the past few months, Oklo remains the belle of the publicly traded SMR startups. Its market capitalization of $9.7 billion makes it worth more than all of the public pure-play SMR companies combined. Over the past week, I’ve taken a deep dive into Oklo’s SEC filings. Those documents show significant selling by DeWitte and Cochran.
Here’s what I found.
