Politico: "The Strange and Totally Real Plan to Blot Out the Sun and Reverse Global Warming"

Since Pasztor left, Stardust has been moving full speed ahead. In October, the company announced a fundraising milestone: It had secured $60 million from funds linked to, among others, Silicon Valley luminaries and an Italian industrial dynasty, bringing the total amount raised by the two-year-old startup to $75 million. It was a stunning development, far larger than any previous investment in solar geoengineering, and it placed Stardust way out in front of the few other groups looking to turn it from a theory into a business. “Don’t want to say only serious game in town,” said Gernot Wagner, climate economist at Columbia Business School and author of Geoengineering: The Gamble. “But yeah.”

Quoted in: "The Strange and Totally Real Plan to Blot Out the Sun and Reverse Global Warming" by Karl Mathiesen and Corbin Hiar, Politico Magazine (21 November 2025).