CTO
CTO Realty Growth, Inc.
stock NYSE

Initially a CIO at a quant firm is in no way shape or form involved in such matters. A CIO primarily concerns themselves with general IT, networks, computers (workstations/laptops), and how the employees access and use the IT equipment and environment.
Quant work typically falls under the purview of R&D which probably reports through trading or a mixture of trading and Tech. Given this is a new technology push, most likely the CTO would be the one requiring this - so if it is coming from the CIO, I would ignore it, or better yet forward the email/chat if it's in writing to your direct and their direct managers. if it's not in written form (email/chat/confluence etc) it never happened.
Furthermore your objectives were probably set during your previous yearly 1-on-1. Drastically changing them now would require the firm to acknowledge the change and confirm you wont be loosing out on your bonus in the current period.
As of today AI/LLM efforts in the quant space are highly speculative, which is short for saying there is a very good chance the initiative will fail or wont meet expectations. So make sure whatever rewards are being offered (bump in salary, a guaranteed bonus etc) are all worth the downside risk to your career. I've seen many people take on high profile projects (new ways of doing something / rebuild trading infra from scratch) and most often than not the initiative fails in a big way, and the individual(s) that spear-headed the initiatives never really recover at the fintech firm and tend to depart - this is different than working in bigtech and other non quant fintech, where people fail time and time again and are more likely to be promoted than demoted.
As someone else mentioned, AI is a very nebulous term, it could literally mean anything, heck: if (a < b) submit_buy($300) else submit_sell($200) could be considered AI by today's standards.
At the moment the likelihood of success with such an initiative in the quant world is not worth the risk to your career - too many unknowns and if you can't brown-nose your way out of the failure and make it seem like a success, you are better off moving on from the firm than staying.

See my original post here: https://www.reddit.com/r/pennystocks/s/8BWJ7MCSxA
Nothing has changed with my original scam thesis. Actually it has only gotten worse. Here is an extended read.
**Note:** I fully expect this post will be attacked by pumper bots again. Be careful what you believe from the inevitable flood of pumper comments that will appear here. I have reason to believe this company has a team of paid social media pumpers.
RNWF / "American Fusion" is a scam. A convicted fraudster's old shell company merged with a fusion startup that has zero revenue, zero demonstrated technology, and a CTO famous for claiming aliens nuked Mars. The stock trades at $0.03 on the OTC with paid promotion warnings. Do not touch this unless you are simply trading the pumps.
RNWF started life as Renewal Fuels, a biodiesel company founded in 2007. It did nothing for years. Then it pivoted to psychedelics, hemp genetics, cannabis banking, and "corporate advisory." None of these generated meaningful revenue. By the time the current story begins, it was a dormant OTC shell. In December 2025, RNWF announced a reverse merger with Kepler Fusion Technologies. The company is now rebranding as "American Fusion" and claims it will connect a 100MW fusion reactor to the grid in North Texas by end of 2026. Let's talk about why that's not going to happen.
RNWF was previously controlled by Justin Costello. In 2022, the SEC charged Costello with securities fraud. He had been posing as a Harvard MBA and hedge fund billionaire while running pump-and-dump schemes across multiple penny stocks, including GRN Holding, which is directly linked to RNWF. The federal indictment states that companies Costello claimed GRN would acquire were "instead acquired by Renewal Fuels Inc., another OTC-traded company controlled by Justin Costello." Costello was indicted on 22 counts of wire fraud and 3 counts of securities fraud. He tried to flee, was caught by an FBI SWAT team carrying gold bars, $70k in cash, and a fake ID. He pled guilty and got 10 years.
The current CEO, Richard Hawkins, is not a random successor. Washington State business records show Hawkins was the registered agent for Manufacturing 360, LLC, an entity formed in 2018 with Costello's email as principal contact, both operating from the same Bellevue, WA address. Draw your own conclusions.
RNWF is currently suing to cancel about 1.68 billion shares from the Costello era. The court dismissed all claims against Costello on Feb 26, 2026, and struck the company's default judgment motion on procedural grounds. This is not going well.
The Texatron is described as a compact torsatron using Deuterium-Helium-3 aneutronic fusion with direct electricity conversion. The company claims it's small enough to fit in the bed of a truck while producing 30MW of power, enough to run 25,000 to 30,000 homes. Think about that claim for a second. ITER, the international fusion project that has cost over $25 billion and taken decades to build, occupies a facility the size of 60 soccer fields and hasn't produced net energy yet. They're working on D-T fusion, which is orders of magnitude easier than D-He3. The D-He3 pathway requires temperatures over four times higher than D-T, with lower reaction cross-sections. No aneutronic fusion system has ever demonstrated sustained or net-energy operation using He-3 fuel cycles. Not one. Anywhere. Ever. TAE Technologies has raised $1.25 billion for aneutronic fusion and hasn't achieved net energy.
Helion Energy is well-funded and hasn't demonstrated it either. There is a reason real fusion reactors are enormous. Containing plasma hotter than the core of the sun requires massive magnetic confinement systems and shielding. The idea that 10 people in Southlake, Texas have miniaturized this into a truck bed is not a breakthrough. It's a fantasy. And if you go look at their actual hardware, it gets worse. In an interview video, the device they show as the Texatron is a tiny thing encased in a thin see-through plastic bubble. That's what's supposedly going to contain fusion plasma. The Kepler Fusion website reads like it was generated by AI. It's vague, buzzword-heavy, and says almost nothing of technical substance.
There's also the He-3 fuel supply problem. Helium-3 is extremely scarce on Earth. Most credible He-3 fusion proposals involve mining the Moon. RNWF doesn't address this.
The company touts its patent portfolio as proof of legitimacy. As of February 27, 2026, they have filed 20 patent applications with the USPTO and claim roughly 240 more in development. None have been granted. I went through all 20 and it's patent flooding. That means taking one idea and filing it over and over with tiny variations so you can tell investors you have a big IP portfolio. Their two oldest filings are from 2022 and 2023 based on the serial number ranges. Both are still just pending after years. The other 18 were all filed in late 2025 and early 2026, with 12 of them filed within days of each other in a single bulk dump. Read the titles and you'll see it immediately. One application covers a symmetric two-piece shell chamber. The next one covers an asymmetric two-piece shell chamber. The next one is the symmetric version again but with a fuel injector added. Then the asymmetric version with a fuel injector. Then two shells with a disk in the middle. Then two shells with a ring in the middle. That's one idea described six ways.
The company actually admits this in their own January 22, 2026 press release, saying the filings are "structured to systematically cover key design permutations." They're telling you it's one concept filed every way they could think of. Only one of the 20 applications is even being reviewed by a patent examiner right now. The other 19 are just sitting in line. And remember, these are applications, not patents. Anyone can file a patent application for a few hundred bucks. It doesn't mean the thing works. Real fusion companies like Commonwealth Fusion Systems and Helion have patents on devices they've actually built and tested. These patents describe the shape of a chamber that has never demonstrated fusion.
Dr. John Brandenburg, the CTO, has real credentials. He worked at Lawrence Livermore, Sandia, and other national labs. But he is primarily known for his theory that an ancient Martian civilization was destroyed by a nuclear attack from aliens. He's published multiple books on this, including "Death on Mars: The Discovery of a Planetary Nuclear Massacre." His claims have been rejected by mainstream scientists who note there is no credible physical evidence supporting them. Being a real physicist who believes fringe things doesn't make the fusion technology real. It tells you what caliber of talent a $93M market cap OTC company attracts versus what Commonwealth Fusion Systems or TAE Technologies can hire.
The financials are nonexistent. Zero revenue. EPS is negative $5.31 TTM. No SEC filings exist. The company has 10 employees. The contact email is renewalfuels@gmail.com. The Form 10 has been "substantially complete" and "filing next week" since January 2026 and still hasn't been filed.
The company issues 2 to 3 GlobeNewswire press releases per week. Almost all are executive appointments, patent application announcements, or geopolitical commentary about why fusion matters. None contain operational milestones, test results, or evidence of a working device.
Paid promoters have been identified. One was paid $1,000 for a single day of social media promotion with a full disclaimer buried at the bottom. The "independent" Harbinger Research report is a paid investor relations product, not institutional equity research. The company just issued a press release tying its fusion platform to the U.S.-Iran conflict and Strait of Hormuz disruption risk. This is what companies do when they have no technology milestones to report. They attach themselves to headlines.
This follows the textbook OTC shell pump playbook. Take a dormant shell with a criminal history. Reverse merge a "technology" company into it. Flood the wire with press releases and executive hires. Flood the USPTO with 20 variations of the same patent application and call it an "IP portfolio." Pay for promotional coverage. Promise SEC reporting is "imminent" but never actually file. Set an unfalsifiable near-term target like 100MW by end of year. Exploit current events for narrative relevance. Let retail pump channels manufacture fake catalysts.
Not investable. Score: 0/10. Fusion energy is real and exciting. Billions of dollars are flowing into legitimate companies working on it. RNWF has nothing to do with any of that. There is no evidence of a working device. The only hardware they've shown publicly is a tiny object in a plastic bubble. There is no revenue, no audited financials, no SEC filings, a corporate history directly intertwined with a convicted securities fraudster, a scientifically implausible claim that a truck-bed reactor will outperform facilities that cost billions, a patent portfolio that is really just one idea filed 20 different ways, paid promotion, and OTC Markets warning flags. If you're interested in fusion as an investment theme, look at companies that have actual reactors, real funding, and institutional backing. Not this.

Initially a CIO at a quant firm is in no way shape or form involved in such matters. A CIO primarily concerns themselves with general IT, networks, computers (workstations/laptops), and how the employees access and use the IT equipment and environment.
Quant work typically falls under the purview of R&D which probably reports through trading or a mixture of trading and Tech. Given this is a new technology push, most likely the CTO would be the one requiring this - so if it is coming from the CIO, I would ignore it, or better yet forward the email/chat if it's in writing to your direct and their direct managers. if it's not in written form (email/chat/confluence etc) it never happened.
Furthermore your objectives were probably set during your previous yearly 1-on-1. Drastically changing them now would require the firm to acknowledge the change and confirm you wont be loosing out on your bonus in the current period.
As of today AI/LLM efforts in the quant space are highly speculative, which is short for saying there is a very good chance the initiative will fail or wont meet expectations. So make sure whatever rewards are being offered (bump in salary, a guaranteed bonus etc) are all worth the downside risk to your career. I've seen many people take on high profile projects (new ways of doing something / rebuild trading infra from scratch) and most often than not the initiative fails in a big way, and the individual(s) that spear-headed the initiatives never really recover at the fintech firm and tend to depart - this is different than working in bigtech and other non quant fintech, where people fail time and time again and are more likely to be promoted than demoted.
As someone else mentioned, AI is a very nebulous term, it could literally mean anything, heck: if (a < b) submit_buy($300) else submit_sell($200) could be considered AI by today's standards.
At the moment the likelihood of success with such an initiative in the quant world is not worth the risk to your career - too many unknowns and if you can't brown-nose your way out of the failure and make it seem like a success, you are better off moving on from the firm than staying.

See my original post here: https://www.reddit.com/r/pennystocks/s/8BWJ7MCSxA
Nothing has changed with my original scam thesis. Actually it has only gotten worse. Here is an extended read.
**Note:** I fully expect this post will be attacked by pumper bots again. Be careful what you believe from the inevitable flood of pumper comments that will appear here. I have reason to believe this company has a team of paid social media pumpers.
RNWF / "American Fusion" is a scam. A convicted fraudster's old shell company merged with a fusion startup that has zero revenue, zero demonstrated technology, and a CTO famous for claiming aliens nuked Mars. The stock trades at $0.03 on the OTC with paid promotion warnings. Do not touch this unless you are simply trading the pumps.
RNWF started life as Renewal Fuels, a biodiesel company founded in 2007. It did nothing for years. Then it pivoted to psychedelics, hemp genetics, cannabis banking, and "corporate advisory." None of these generated meaningful revenue. By the time the current story begins, it was a dormant OTC shell. In December 2025, RNWF announced a reverse merger with Kepler Fusion Technologies. The company is now rebranding as "American Fusion" and claims it will connect a 100MW fusion reactor to the grid in North Texas by end of 2026. Let's talk about why that's not going to happen.
RNWF was previously controlled by Justin Costello. In 2022, the SEC charged Costello with securities fraud. He had been posing as a Harvard MBA and hedge fund billionaire while running pump-and-dump schemes across multiple penny stocks, including GRN Holding, which is directly linked to RNWF. The federal indictment states that companies Costello claimed GRN would acquire were "instead acquired by Renewal Fuels Inc., another OTC-traded company controlled by Justin Costello." Costello was indicted on 22 counts of wire fraud and 3 counts of securities fraud. He tried to flee, was caught by an FBI SWAT team carrying gold bars, $70k in cash, and a fake ID. He pled guilty and got 10 years.
The current CEO, Richard Hawkins, is not a random successor. Washington State business records show Hawkins was the registered agent for Manufacturing 360, LLC, an entity formed in 2018 with Costello's email as principal contact, both operating from the same Bellevue, WA address. Draw your own conclusions.
RNWF is currently suing to cancel about 1.68 billion shares from the Costello era. The court dismissed all claims against Costello on Feb 26, 2026, and struck the company's default judgment motion on procedural grounds. This is not going well.
The Texatron is described as a compact torsatron using Deuterium-Helium-3 aneutronic fusion with direct electricity conversion. The company claims it's small enough to fit in the bed of a truck while producing 30MW of power, enough to run 25,000 to 30,000 homes. Think about that claim for a second. ITER, the international fusion project that has cost over $25 billion and taken decades to build, occupies a facility the size of 60 soccer fields and hasn't produced net energy yet. They're working on D-T fusion, which is orders of magnitude easier than D-He3. The D-He3 pathway requires temperatures over four times higher than D-T, with lower reaction cross-sections. No aneutronic fusion system has ever demonstrated sustained or net-energy operation using He-3 fuel cycles. Not one. Anywhere. Ever. TAE Technologies has raised $1.25 billion for aneutronic fusion and hasn't achieved net energy.
Helion Energy is well-funded and hasn't demonstrated it either. There is a reason real fusion reactors are enormous. Containing plasma hotter than the core of the sun requires massive magnetic confinement systems and shielding. The idea that 10 people in Southlake, Texas have miniaturized this into a truck bed is not a breakthrough. It's a fantasy. And if you go look at their actual hardware, it gets worse. In an interview video, the device they show as the Texatron is a tiny thing encased in a thin see-through plastic bubble. That's what's supposedly going to contain fusion plasma. The Kepler Fusion website reads like it was generated by AI. It's vague, buzzword-heavy, and says almost nothing of technical substance.
There's also the He-3 fuel supply problem. Helium-3 is extremely scarce on Earth. Most credible He-3 fusion proposals involve mining the Moon. RNWF doesn't address this.
The company touts its patent portfolio as proof of legitimacy. As of February 27, 2026, they have filed 20 patent applications with the USPTO and claim roughly 240 more in development. None have been granted. I went through all 20 and it's patent flooding. That means taking one idea and filing it over and over with tiny variations so you can tell investors you have a big IP portfolio. Their two oldest filings are from 2022 and 2023 based on the serial number ranges. Both are still just pending after years. The other 18 were all filed in late 2025 and early 2026, with 12 of them filed within days of each other in a single bulk dump. Read the titles and you'll see it immediately. One application covers a symmetric two-piece shell chamber. The next one covers an asymmetric two-piece shell chamber. The next one is the symmetric version again but with a fuel injector added. Then the asymmetric version with a fuel injector. Then two shells with a disk in the middle. Then two shells with a ring in the middle. That's one idea described six ways.
The company actually admits this in their own January 22, 2026 press release, saying the filings are "structured to systematically cover key design permutations." They're telling you it's one concept filed every way they could think of. Only one of the 20 applications is even being reviewed by a patent examiner right now. The other 19 are just sitting in line. And remember, these are applications, not patents. Anyone can file a patent application for a few hundred bucks. It doesn't mean the thing works. Real fusion companies like Commonwealth Fusion Systems and Helion have patents on devices they've actually built and tested. These patents describe the shape of a chamber that has never demonstrated fusion.
Dr. John Brandenburg, the CTO, has real credentials. He worked at Lawrence Livermore, Sandia, and other national labs. But he is primarily known for his theory that an ancient Martian civilization was destroyed by a nuclear attack from aliens. He's published multiple books on this, including "Death on Mars: The Discovery of a Planetary Nuclear Massacre." His claims have been rejected by mainstream scientists who note there is no credible physical evidence supporting them. Being a real physicist who believes fringe things doesn't make the fusion technology real. It tells you what caliber of talent a $93M market cap OTC company attracts versus what Commonwealth Fusion Systems or TAE Technologies can hire.
The financials are nonexistent. Zero revenue. EPS is negative $5.31 TTM. No SEC filings exist. The company has 10 employees. The contact email is renewalfuels@gmail.com. The Form 10 has been "substantially complete" and "filing next week" since January 2026 and still hasn't been filed.
The company issues 2 to 3 GlobeNewswire press releases per week. Almost all are executive appointments, patent application announcements, or geopolitical commentary about why fusion matters. None contain operational milestones, test results, or evidence of a working device.
Paid promoters have been identified. One was paid $1,000 for a single day of social media promotion with a full disclaimer buried at the bottom. The "independent" Harbinger Research report is a paid investor relations product, not institutional equity research. The company just issued a press release tying its fusion platform to the U.S.-Iran conflict and Strait of Hormuz disruption risk. This is what companies do when they have no technology milestones to report. They attach themselves to headlines.
This follows the textbook OTC shell pump playbook. Take a dormant shell with a criminal history. Reverse merge a "technology" company into it. Flood the wire with press releases and executive hires. Flood the USPTO with 20 variations of the same patent application and call it an "IP portfolio." Pay for promotional coverage. Promise SEC reporting is "imminent" but never actually file. Set an unfalsifiable near-term target like 100MW by end of year. Exploit current events for narrative relevance. Let retail pump channels manufacture fake catalysts.
Not investable. Score: 0/10. Fusion energy is real and exciting. Billions of dollars are flowing into legitimate companies working on it. RNWF has nothing to do with any of that. There is no evidence of a working device. The only hardware they've shown publicly is a tiny object in a plastic bubble. There is no revenue, no audited financials, no SEC filings, a corporate history directly intertwined with a convicted securities fraudster, a scientifically implausible claim that a truck-bed reactor will outperform facilities that cost billions, a patent portfolio that is really just one idea filed 20 different ways, paid promotion, and OTC Markets warning flags. If you're interested in fusion as an investment theme, look at companies that have actual reactors, real funding, and institutional backing. Not this.

Well I had worked for AMD before. Lisa Su was the COO, with Rory Read as CEO and our dear Papermaster as CTO. All three from IBM. And they made tons of troubles. I still have some friends working for AMD and some joined years after I left. For the past 10+ years, there are things never change inside those IBM veterans. They still make critical mistakes.
Also there's some key culture inside AMD. AMD is always a hardware first company, not software. All kind of hardware architects hardy get praised if they did something make software side easier.

The company I worked for were not happy with Oracle licenses, something related to licensing per cpu core. The CTO requested departments to transition to other databases. Unfortunately some departments needed very many years to switch. This was 10+ years ago.

https://www.reddit.com/r/loopringorg/s/WBwFYpyfZx
Not even a year since I made this reality post and got swarmed by all the moonboys…. Dead silence.
What happened to GME reviving the marketplace bc you noticed onchain activity?
What happened to CTO?
What happened to the 20% pumps for no reason (while ETH was pumping) and the sell wall that was going to break?
All the discord mods aren’t working for LRC anymore, delisting left and right with Binance next…
\#Where oh where have the moonboys gone?

That’s complete horse shit. I work as a software engineering manager and after a push from our CTO I was able to cut the engineering team from 78 people to just 11. I run multiple Claude agents with my own RAC DB along with Claude skills and plugins. I also have co-pilot in my pipelines that auto reviews all my code. We are also using AMP to give us a mixture of experts to cover the gaps from the other 2 tools.
We are working better with 11 people and our AI tools than we did from 80.

VoteDoge CTO Comeback — Almost 2 Years Old | ~1K Holders | Rebuilding for the Midterms