Nigerian billionaire businessman Femi Otedola has disclosed that he sold his stake in Geregu Power Plc to invest in the planned public offering of the Dangote refinery project owned by Aliko Dangote.

Mr Otedola made the disclosure while speaking to journalists during a visit to the Dangote Refinery on Wednesday.

While praising Mr Dangote’s industrial projects, he described the businessman as “a colossus” and “one of the greatest men that has come out of Africa.”

“That’s one of the reasons why I sold my stake in the Geregu plant to come and invest my proceeds in the IPO of Dangote Refinery,” Mr Otedola said.

The businessman said he had repeatedly appealed to Mr Dangote to allocate shares to him in the refinery’s private placement.

“On a personal note, I have appealed to him. I have been here with him 25 times,” he said, adding that as part of his compensation, Mr Dangote should allocate him shares worth $100 million during the private placement phase.

Mr Otedola described the Dangote refinery project as a transformational investment capable of freeing Nigeria and Africa from economic dependence.

“I wish Aliko Dangote is a colossus, a genius, probably one of the greatest men that has come out of Africa for delivering us out of economic slavery in Nigeria and by extension Africa,” he said.

Last December, Mr Otedola offloaded his interest in Geregu Power Plc, the electricity generation company he took public in October 2022 at a market value of N250 billion, which was valued at the time to be in the neighbourhood of N2.9 trillion.

The deal was valued at $750 million, a source with knowledge of the transaction told PREMIUM TIMES at the time. Until the completion of the share sale, he was the majority owner of the Lagos-quoted firm.

In his remarks on Wednesday, Mr Dangote revealed that preparations were underway for an Initial Public Offering (IPO) of the refinery, which he said could be launched by September.

According to him, investor demand for the offering has already reached “billions of dollars.”

“There is quite a lot of demand in terms of people disturbing us, pushing us, saying we want to buy,” he said.

Mr Dangote said the goal was to allow early investors to benefit from the refinery’s future growth in the same way investors benefited from early stakes in global technology firms.

“We want it to be like when you buy Amazon or Apple… everybody has become a millionaire and that is what we want to bring into Africa,” he said.

READ ALSO: Billionaire, Femi Otedola, among writers shortlisted for BCA African Business Book 2026

The Dangote refinery, located in Lagos, began fuel production last year and is expected to significantly reduce Nigeria’s dependence on imported petroleum products.

The facility has been widely described as Africa’s largest refinery and one of the biggest single-train refineries globally.

Mr Otedola’s comments come amid increasing investor interest in large-scale infrastructure and energy assets in Nigeria, especially projects linked to domestic refining and industrialisation.

One news headline this week had a whiff of déjà vu about it. Nuclear startup Deep Fission announced that it was going public, hoping to garner investor support to build subterranean reactors to power AI data centers.

Wait, didn’t I already write that story? I could have sworn that I did. 

Oh right, I did. Last September, Deep Fission said that it had gone public via a reverse merger with Surfside Acquisition, a Delaware shell company, a transaction in which a private company acquires an existing publicly listed entity to gain a stock market listing — raising $30 million in a concurrent private placement at $3 a share. Now it’s seeking $157 million in a Nasdaq IPO at $24 to $26 a share. You can see my confusion.

Turns out the previous public listing was public in name only. The reverse merger with Surfside was completed, making Deep Fission a reporting company with SEC obligations, but its stock never actually traded. The company had said it intended to list on the OTCQB, a marketplace for developing companies that don’t meet the listing requirements of major exchanges like the NYSE or Nasdaq. But searches for Deep Fission on OTCQB don’t return any results, and the company, in its S-1, denied that its stock had ever been publicly traded.

In response to questions from TechCrunch, Deep Fission declined to comment, citing the quiet period before its IPO.

Deep Fission’s new public offering on Nasdaq is following the more traditional IPO route, with an offering that would value the company at up to $1.66 billion. It’s a sizable figure for a company that one year ago was struggling to raise a $15 million funding round.

Stranger still, the picture painted in the S-1 filed on May 20 is arguably bleaker than the one outlined in the December filing with the SEC. Its timeline for turning on its first reactor has slipped. Further, back in December, it had hoped to achieve criticality — the point at which a nuclear chain reaction becomes self-sustaining — by July 2026. Now, it won’t provide an estimate. 

Deep Fission does point out that it is drilling a test well. It has also lost a lot of money. 

One thing that hasn’t changed: The new S-1 statement contains the same “going concern” warning present in December. If Deep Fission doesn’t complete the IPO, it could run out of money in the next 12 months.

In fact, the startup’s financial position has worsened in recent months. As of March, its deficit had grown to $88.1 million from $56.2 million. In the last month and a half, the company’s cash and cash equivalents declined by $6.4 million, or about 7%.

On the technical front, Deep Fission says it is now prioritizing drilling, perhaps a tacit admission that making holes in the ground isn’t as easy as it sounds. 

The company says it started drilling the first of three test wells in March. The well will be used to collect data “up to 6,000 feet deep.” At eight inches in diameter, it’s quite a bit smaller than will be needed at commercial scale. 

The challenges in moving from a test well to commercial scale are likely to be significant. Deep Fission says it will need boreholes 30 to 50 inches in diameter and a mile deep, though it hasn’t settled on a specific dimension yet. Even at the low end, its boreholes will be larger than what’s typically used in the oil and gas industry. And until Deep Fission knows how large of a hole it can drill, it’ll have a hard time finalizing its reactor design.

So what has changed since December that would spur a bigger offering at a nine-figure valuation? The company did receive an $80 million equity investment, including $20 million from data center developer Blue Owl, which also signed a non-binding MOU for future power plants. Still, that wasn’t enough to stave off the going concern warning. It’s possible that Deep Fission is sitting on some positive information that it omitted from the S-1, though that’s hard to believe given what’s riding on the IPO.

It’s more likely that the company and its backers are seeking to capitalize on investor excitement over fission power. Just last month, nuclear fission startup X-energy went public in an upsized IPO. But unlike Deep Fission, X-energy is generating revenue and is significantly farther along in the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s licensing process — a contrast that serves as a useful reminder that in a sector where enthusiasm can run well ahead of technical and regulatory reality, valuation and progress aren’t the same thing.

It isn’t exactly clear what factors are driving Deep Fission toward its IPO, but technological or commercial progress doesn’t seem to be among them.