I don't understand Nikola at all. There are so many red flags, yet large credible companies appear to be willing to partner with them and buy from them. I suspect the terms are probably quite one sided, but even then there's reputation risk for partnering with the next Theranos.

I listened to the CEO talk for an hour about their dedicated route hydrogen business model for trucking, and it actually seems like a good idea. The thesis is that 25% of trucks drive back and forth on the same route for their entire lifetime, so you pick the busiest route, build a hydrogen station on it, and sell a bunch of trucks to use it at capacity.

This avoids the chicken and egg problem of building thousands of stations everywhere before you can sell your first vehicle.

I don't know anything about the industry, and I wouldn't trust their ability to execute, but the plan itself seems sensible. As the renewable grid share increases, there's going to be a bunch of excess capacity at times that can be used very cheaply, meaning the end to end efficiency of hydrogen may not be a deal breaker. Without a multiple of current battery energy density, long range BEV trucking will be tough.

Then there's the Badger/GM partnership. They got Iveco to make their trucks, and now they're getting GM to make their pickup. It makes me wonder if their strategy is going to be permanently outsource manufacturing and try to be a Pepsi to Tesla's Coke, partnering with traditional manufacturers which are able to build vehicles technically, but lack the modern sexiness of the new crop of BEV car makers.

But if they do pull any of this off, it's going to go down as one of the greatest fake it til you make it examples in modern history. They probably did bullshit their way in to this market cap - I wouldn't be surprised if every word of the short seller report is true. But the market cap does opens doors.