Alchemy: US startup claims to have produced gold from mercury

Marathon Fusion, a small fusion energy company in San Francisco, announced on Wednesday that it had transmuted, or converted, mercury into stable gold last month, beating a record set by CERN tenfold. The claim, which has not been independently verified, revives an alchemist's dream and a market fear that lab-made gold could do to bullion what lab-grown precious stones did to diamonds.

Founded in 2023, Marathon develops fuel systems for future fusion power plants, which aim to generate electricity by fusing atoms together, as the sun does, writes Euronews.

The company was founded by Kyle Schiller and Adam Rutkowski, a former SpaceX engineer. It lists the US Department of Energy as a partner on its website and won a 2023 award from ARPA-E, the department's agency for high-risk energy research.

Its backers include Breakthrough Energy, the climate technology network founded by Bill Gates, and Anglo American, the mining group that owns De Beers, the world's leading natural diamond company behind the "A diamond is forever" slogan.

In its announcement, the company said it had turned "mercury into real, stable gold, beating CERN's record by a factor of 10".

In 2025, CERN said its Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's most powerful particle accelerator, had created about 29 picograms, or 29 trillionths of a gram, of gold during its 2015–2018 run. That amounted to around 86 billion gold nuclei, or atomic cores, which existed for only a tiny fraction of a second before being destroyed in collisions with accelerator equipment.

Unlike the procedure used in CERN, Marathon claims that its method fires neutrons from fusion reactions at mercury, turning it into an unstable isotope, or form of the metal, that decays into gold.

It also claims to have broken a 40-year-old Soviet record with its plasma centrifuge, a machine that spins electrically charged gas at high speed to separate isotopes used in fusion fuel.

It says it is now building a reactor in San Francisco to achieve record power density, meaning the most power produced for its size.

Still, the gold claim has not been independently verified, and the material available does not establish how much gold was produced or at what cost.

Marathon Fusion

Kyle Schiller

Adam Rutkowski

mercury

gold