Is it?
You are assuming cold fusion is possible. We don't know that. It might be one more step before we finally prove it is never possible.
You are also assuming that cold fusion is something this path of research will lead us to. However this might be a misstep that isn't helpful at all because it doesn't prove anything useful about the as yet unknown physical process that cold fusion needs.
We just don't know, and cannot know at this point.
Similar statements were already claimed about nuclear fission power plants in the 70s.
> The second we're able to understand and capture this [cold fusion] energy, money literally doesn't exist. Infinite energy means infinite free energy, which would also abolish money from a fundamental market value perspective.
This said beyond the marketing there is a reality that if cold fusion did show up that there is a singularity event that occurs that making predictions past that point will almost always fail as the world would change very rapidly.
Unpopular opinion: Google makes an insane amount of money, so they can afford this salary. The CERN (or whatever your favourite research institute is), on the other hand, is no money-printing machine.