Grand jury indicts Trevor Milton, Nikola founder, on three counts of fraud | Hacker News Reader

Grand jury indicts Trevor Milton, Nikola founder, on three counts of fraud

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This should not be surprising to anyone. Arstechnica has followed Nikola's terrible and obvious fraud(s) for years now:

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2021/02/nikola-admits-to-making...

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2020/12/nikola-stock-craters-af...

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2020/09/nikola-patented-a-stole...

And many more...

The speculation around this stock has been insane for many years now:

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2020/11/nikola-stock-soars-afte...

Top quote: "The market can remain irrational longer than you can roll your eyes at it."

Even the name screams transparent fraud, a ridiculously obvious attempt to associate with Tesla.

Weren't there VCs who put money into this? What were they thinking? Were they being amoral and hoping to ride this pump and dump or did they actually buy into this shit?

My first thought when hearing of the company was the J. T. Marlin "brokerage" from the movie Boiler Room. And for those viewers that didn't get the joke, the movie helpfully provides a scene where other brokers in a bar make fun of the uncanny resemblance to "J. P. Morgan".

Bonus point for the ethical similarities between J. T. Marlin and Nikola.

This Nikola thing looks pretty weird indeed, but to be fair, Musk's name for his company is also not very original, since he (or whoever) also just took the dude's name even though he had absolutely nothing to do with him.

I thought Musk joined after it had been founded? Did he change the name?

No, Musk had literally nothing to do with the name, just a continuation of his myth as anything more than a guy with a lot of money.

a guy with a lot of money

Well, in the words of Batman when asked about his superpower, "I'm rich".

Is it really a significant part of his myth that he named the company?

I didn't say it was significant! Though, being considered a 'co-founder' of Tesla was important enough to him to sue the actual founders.

I think Bezos has demonstrated quite convincingly that simply having a lot of money does not mean you can compete with SpaceX. Similarly, I don't know much about the automotive industry, but turning a company with a few employees into one of the most valuable companies in the world is not easy, even if you have $100 million to play with at the start.

It's OK to simultaneously believe that "Elon Musk is very effective at growing engineering businesses to the point that they disrupt entire industries" and also that "Elon Musk is not as smart as he thinks he is, and his tweets are embarrassing".

He started as a guy without money and got to briefly be the guy with the most money which is not so easy to do.

Are you sure he had no money? Was he born in a low or middle-class family?

"Tesla almost had a very different name—until Elon Musk and his co-founders bought the rights to “Tesla” for $75,000"

https://fortune.com/2018/12/09/tesla-name-faraday-elon-musk/

Tesla's name is somewhat original because the connection between electricty and Tesla is certainly obvious and understandable, yet also rare enough in the US compared to Edison that it wasn't already taken.

A second company then copying exactly the same association? Different thing entirely.

It's also name for the SI unit of magnetic flux density, which fits with the electric motor theme.

Tesla invented the AC motor which was used in the first roadster so thats why they named it that. Very logical…

And I remember around the time Tesla-the-car-company first emerged, rolling my eyes at the name. Like "Oh here we go, another EV startup using the guy's name without permission because his estate isn't set up to sue anyone who speaks it the way Edison's is. Best we can hope for is they do something cool and don't dishonor his legacy."

There are times I'm glad to have misjudged someone.

Tesla is also an SI unit associated with electricity. Then again, are there any companies called "Ohm" or "Ampere"?

https://ampere.shop

Not the company name, but the Chevy Volt was sold as the Ampera in Europe.

There's a computing startup founded by ex-Intel folks named Ampere

Generally don't comment on sub-posts, but Boiler Room is a great movie! And very apropo to the current market stock/crypto craze going on right now.

> Weren't there VCs who put money into this?

Definitely, but worse than that, real companies that really should have known better.

GM associated themselves. For what reason I can’t figure out. It must have been high up because the GM engineers I know all knew it was a 100% scam.

It’s like anything else that confuses me in business. Some idiot made a mistake, sure, but then their boss approved that, and all the other people required approved it, and at no point did anyone say “Hey, wait, no, stop”.

I read an article, over a year ago now, that said the GM deal was nothing but upside for GM

They got cash from Nikola whether they ended up manufacturing anything for them or not, and had to put up nothing up front.

Reputational hit from propping up literal fraud. Opportunity cost from not partnering with better companies in the space.

GM’s reputation is trash with anyone but patriotic “GM/Chevy” Americans already.

So long as the public are willing to believe they’re essential, they’ll remain too big to fail and don’t need to worry about their reputation.

One of the NKLA board members Steve Girsky was previously a Vice Chairmen at GM and likely facilitated this deal. I think it needs to be investigated further and Mary Barra should be forced to provide the evidence of due dilligence that GM collected during the closing of the deal.

What due diligence is reasonably required of GM, if the deal is obviously a win or wash for them, no matter what happens at NKLA?

Some analysis that they knew how scammy it was and proceeded because of an analysis it was worth it in other ways?

If all there is, is a memo saying ‘just buy it, and don’t look too hard’, or it looks like they fell for an obvious scam, then the execs can be on the hook for negligence to the shareholders

I think its more sinister then that unfortunatly. The GM deal was concocted to give almost zero risk to GM but crucially it was intended to give new investors confidence that a major player looked at NKLA and did due diligence.

Sounds like tons of billable hours to me while every email and correspondence is pored over to see if it is a giant conspiracy and who knew what, and when, etc.

I can feel the lawyers yachts being built.

I get the sense that you (& many others) believe that GM should have acted as a regulated bank ("know your customer" rules), as a regulated securities rating firm, and/or as an authoritative moral inquisitor & judge with regard to NKLA.

GM is none of those. (And they were not proposing to acquire NKLA, for "due diligence" to apply for that reason.) They are a car company. Their execs' duty to GM shareholders is to not stupidly squander GM's money. The contract was a "win or wash" situation for GM - so that duty was fulfilled. They don't have to even do - let alone produce - a written analysis. The same goes for GM's contracts with the supplies of tires, floor mats, wiper blades, etc. for the cars they assemble.

Certainly one can accuse GM of acting rather uncaring and sleazy with regard to NKLA. Nothing special about that - most older people (at least from parts of the U.S. where the auto industry is concentrated) could tell you that all of the big auto makers got over their "Don't Be Evil" idealism many, many decades ago now.

They have a duty to they shareholders to not squander money, correct? That is what I was addressing.

Also, individually they have duties to not commit crimes (like conspiracy to defraud, or whatever).

If there is evidence they conspired with someone to commit securities fraud, even if it had nothing to do with GM, then regardless of their duties to GM, then they can go to jail for that.

If they knowingly were irresponsible/negligent as officers of the company in how they approved deals, they could be fired or sued, depending on how blatant it is.

Since it didn’t seem to hurt GM’s bottom line, seems like the latter is unlikely.

Because it would be illegal for Girsky to use his influence to have GM say they did due dilligence thus attracting other investors to the slaughterhouse.

Welcome to broken Capitalism, when the incentives are ass-backwards. Juice quarterly returns, give yourself a massive tax-lite bonus, and walk away from ruins. Or better yet, get in on a con or a pyramid scheme. What's the worst that can happen? Jail? Please.

It's just, this time the pyramid collapsed faster than it should have. Due diligence is for losers.

Just "Copying Tesla" is not a fraud by a mile, the whole point of capitalism is that enterprises compete by offering alternative solutions[1]. It is actually surprising it took so long for someone to copy the "electric car company with Tesla characteristics", given the insanely attractive cost of equity capital that Tesla is enjoying.

Matt Levine wrote a section on this, about how Elon said good-bye to earnings calls since his funding is coming mostly from retail investors, to whom he speaks via Twitter and memes, they don't listen to the call anyhow so why bother :)

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-07-27/matt-l...

[1] Well unless (unless! unless!) it eventually turns out that Tesla is a fraud and you're copying that too.

Whatever you think of them, the Tesla fanboys have been proven more right then wrong and the likes of Matt Levine (and Bloomberg) are just bitter at this point.

A lot of EV startups like NKLA are going to come and go but very few if any will be able to replicate Teslas success in the long term. Retail investors are not always stupid, many of the same Tesla investors have been shorting NKLA since it came on via a spac offering.

Personally I don’t always love everything Elon does but I view him in many ways as a modern day Edison. It’s always funny to me to go back and read stuff said about Edison while he was alive. I very much color my view of Musk by historical perspective and try not to get lost in present day minutia.

and the likes of Matt Levine (and Bloomberg) are just bitter

Matt Levine has also struck me as more amused-- and perhaps confused-- than bitter about this.

Matt writes brilliantly on irrational, ridiculous, silly happenings in the world of finance. My guess is he's happy for a such a steady stream of subject matter.

He most definitely is :)

BTW, you can subscribe to the email newsletter for Money Stuff, then you can access it without paying for a subscription to Bloomberg.

> Retail investors are not always stupid,

Matt Levine wrote an article mocking them for buying Hertz stock, then a bit later another one saying "wait no that was actually a very smart thing".

"Whatever you think of them, the Tesla fanboys have been proven more right then wrong"

I'm not sure why that's interesting or important. The Tesla fanboys had no special insight into Tesla, Elon or anything. They are part of a cult of personality that bought the marketing hook, line, and sinker.

Only about a year ago there were hundreds of Trevor Milton fanboys all over HN, Reddit and elsewhere just sure that Nikola was the next Tesla and anyone that didn't agree was just "bitter" or had no vision. Where are they now?

There's no difference between either group of fanboys, really. Other than one got lucky and their cult leader delivered on some of his claims.

>a ridiculously obvious attempt to associate with Tesla.

Nikola was building barely functional prototypes of their trucks years before Tesla was building barely functional Semi truck prototypes, for the record.

>What were they thinking? Were they being amoral and hoping to ride this pump and dump or did they actually buy into this shit?

Fundamentally, what have they done that's so evil compared to, say, the multitude of things Tesla has claimed over the past few years?

For example, Tesla claimed door-to-door cross country self-driving tests, oh, about 5 years ago. At what point is it aspiration versus indictable fraud?

Well... Tesla actually sells real cars. Nikola so far looks little different than your average kickstarter that never delivers.

>Well... Tesla actually sells real cars.

So if you sell cars and land rockets, you can lie about other things?

Hopefully not - but at least you’d not be 100% fraudulent, unlike the lovely subject of this posting.

> Nikola was building barely functional prototypes of their trucks years before Tesla was building barely functional Semi truck prototypes, for the record.

If by "barely functional" you mean a metal skeleton on wheels that rolled down hills, then yes.

I'm not a shill for Tesla as they definitely have made very questionable claims in the past, but to claim that Nikola's semi is in any way similar to Tesla is a bit of a stretch.

This person is a troll. The Tesla semi is not “barely functional”. They have been spotted driving all over the place and doing real world testing on actual highways and in cold weather. Production was already to be started except for a shortage of battery cells (due to the extreme popularity of their existing cars and powerwalls/megapacks) which they are working to remedy.

The Tesla truck is vaporware https://youtu.be/56862W24HK8

The reservation page is up, they are talking delivery in 2022.

Like they took delivery in 2019?

And in 2022 it will be 2024. And you will continue to think that doesn't matter. If deadlines don't matter why can't Nikola claim the same thing? "It doesn't work yet, but it will?"

Because Tesla did not demonstrate fake trucks to get funding or take orders. The prototypes are not making materially false implications. Tesla does have the technology to make electric trucks, however bad they may be compared to Nikola which had a rolling shell.

Tesla and Musk do many bad things, but I'm sure if their truck was just a shell - they'd be in deep trouble too.

>(Because Tesla did not demonstrate fake trucks to get funding or take orders

They demonstrated fake Solar shingles though. Then bailed out a related party and did a fundraise on it.

It still doesn't say how much it will be able to carry. They'll sell some for the marketing value, but no company will replace their diesel fleet with it

>This person is a troll.

That's a baseless accusation, where are the mods?

>They have been spotted driving all over the place and doing real world testing on actual highways and in cold weather.

Prototypes, with zero evidence they can achieve the claimed specifications. If you know otherwise, please, show us all. They are dependent on 4680 cells, which do not exist. They don't even have a factory, and they claimed the trucks would be ready for production 2 years ago. They will probably build something that works at some point in the future. Maybe Nikola could have as well? That is my point, where do you draw the line?

Now, what about FSD? And the solar shingles that "print money" that were faked on the set of Desperate Housewives and don't exist to this day? You know, they ones that Tesla shareholders are currently suing for? The ones that Tesla employees claim were fake in the deposition of said lawsuit? The ones you now buy are generic versions from China. What about the boring car tunnels; bit different from the old renderings, aren't they?

You have to be a troll if you are trying to convince people that a self propulsive vehicle, and an unpowered structure that can only move by being pushed or rolling down a hill are the same thing.

If you think the lawsuit is merely about rolling the truck down the hill, as opposed to lying to investors about their current tech, I'm not sure what to tell you.

There is zero evidence Tesla has a semitruck that with the range the claim at the price they claim to be able to produce it.

They can get range with enough batteries.

So at most the price is wrong. That's nothing compared to offering a completely fake product.

>That's nothing compared to offering a completely fake product.

I cannot wrap my head around this mindset.

So the truck doesn't exist in any manner in which they claim, be it speed, hauling capacity, range or price. But what they claim also isn't "fake"?

Let me spell it out, again: Tesla has raised money off of technology for which there's is no evidence they can or will ever achieve. FSD, solar shingles, the Semi's specs/price, the Cybertruck's spec/price (it's likely the Cybertruck as demonstrated isn't even street legal).

The fact that they have an unproven prototype roaming the streets is a long way from what they are selling. Why does the fact that they have one-off prototypes absolve them of this?

I've asked these questions multiple times, but the Tesla shareholders/astroturfers refuse to answer them:

1) had Nikola put their Semi cab on top of a golf cart frame to film the video (or better yet, a Model X frame ie no real underlying tech to match their claims), would that have been fine, because it "drove"? Sounds like it.

2) what about the Solar shingle demo? Employees involved in it claimed, under oath, that it did not function. It still doesn't exist today. The Buffalo factory is practically idle and shingles are generically sourced from China. Is that something you would consider "fake"?

> So the truck doesn't exist in any manner in which they claim, be it speed, hauling capacity, range or price. But what they claim also isn't "fake"?

Where did all those come from? You just said range and price before, and range is easy to fix.

And if a product costs more than expected to build, it still exists.

> shareholders/astroturfers

Shove off.

> solar shingles

They installed a couple dozen roofs, didn't they? Based on my existing knowledge I'd call it garbage but not fake. How long was this demo before those installations, and did any of the parts work?

>Where did all those come from? You just said range and price before

Who cares "what I said before". These are claims they've made that have no basis in reality. Claiming "we have a truck that can do all this" and can't is not that far away from claiming "we have a working truck" when you don't.

>They installed a couple dozen roofs, didn't they?

So you don't even know, you're guessing. They literally installed fake roofs that didn't function on a Hollywood neighbourhood set piece, then bought the company who claimed to be able to make these (a related party) within days. Is that much different than rolling a truck down a hill to raise money?

This information is free on the internet, people have been reporting on it for years. But the Tesla PR machine is strong. Try reading the law suit deposition, and then go try to order the shingles they advertised during the event. Then go visit the Buffalo factory where they were to produce these shingles (received hundreds of millions in subsidies for it). Then go look at what they are actually installing, years later, at jacked prices (generic shingles anyone can order from Chinese producers). And if you're still keen, you can read the reporting on the lawsuit happening right now about how all this came together to bail out Solar City.

Here is an opinion piece about some of it:

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-07-30/nikola...

Not sure about you, but slapping an inferior product together, years later at a higher price, that isn't what you demonstrated when you took the money, is fraudulent:

https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/30/22410075/tesla-solar-roof...

"We can't actually deliver the product for the price we told you". Huh.

We can also talk about the "Paint it Black" FSD video, which was heavily edited to demonstrate full self driving capabilities which still don't exist today (and may never, but for which they have received billions in revenue) as a marketing piece. After that, maybe the battery swap (earned millions in subsidies from California), which also was not a feasible technology with a faked demonstration. Here's a little read on that one:

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/12/21/the-tesla-battery-swa...

>Based on my existing knowledge I'd call it garbage but not fake.

I guess one could argue the Nikola truck was "garbage" because it had no drivetrain, but not "fake" because it existed? We did see it roll down the hill, after all.

Nikola was a fraud. Other companies are doing the same thing, because it works.

>Shove off.

Boy, you were pretty quiet when people were accusing me of trolling and being a shortseller above, eh. Why is that?

I'm going to let you in on something cool: I'm not a shortseller, I have no financial stake in Tesla other than what I own, long, in S&P500 ETFs. Meanwhile, there are Tesla shareholders and owners in this thread and others, who don't offer any disclaimer when they praise the company.

Interesting how your preconceived biases can lead you to conclusions that are in fact the opposite of reality. Fancy that.

> Who cares "what I said before".

Because it's really hard to talk about whether a product is fraudulent or not if the list of problems keeps changing.

> Claiming "we have a truck that can do all this" and can't is not that far away from claiming "we have a working truck" when you don't.

To an extent, yes. With the huge caveat that production cost is not something a truck 'does'.

> So you don't even know, you're guessing.

I'm going by the best news articles I could find on short notice. If you have better, link it. I don't think it's reasonable to demand I go do physical tours before I can talk about the subject.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tesla-solar-insight/insid...

"In California, the nation’s leading solar market, there were twelve Tesla roof systems connected to the grid as of May 31"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFWKVraGI1E

"Tesla Solar Roof - 100 Days After Installation"

> They literally installed fake roofs that didn't function on a Hollywood neighbourhood set piece, then bought the company who claimed to be able to make these (a related party) within days. Is that much different than rolling a truck down a hill to raise money?

So with this I was able to find some info. It's true, there was a fake demo of a particular kind of tile.

But the product does exist now. Your claim that it still doesn't exist is just wrong.

It's also important to note that they had different-looking tiles that already worked, and by the time they took preorders it looks like things were working.

So that's bad, but it's not on the same level as nikola.

> Not sure about you, but slapping an inferior product together, years later at a higher price, that isn't what you demonstrated when you took the money, is fraudulent

If you charge more than you promised, yes. That's different from being unable to meet the originally planned production cost on something. If you let people cancel orders, which tesla appears to be doing, it's not fraud.

> the battery swap (earned millions in subsidies from California), which also was not a feasible technology with a faked demonstration

Wow, that's pretty bad! Thanks for the info, I'll bring it up to people in the future.

Still not on par with a fake product though.

> Boy, you were pretty quiet when people were accusing me of trolling and being a shortseller above, eh. Why is that?

I don't respond to every comment that is rude to a third party. Almost none of them, really.

> Interesting how your preconceived biases can lead you to conclusions that are in fact the opposite of reality. Fancy that.

You're making wild assumptions about what I believe and getting them wrong. Fancy that.

And you do/did come off a bit like a troll in some of your comments.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXJ9WUciBVA seems pretty real

what's that about generics from China? I'd love a link

>but to claim that Nikola's semi is in any way similar to Tesla is a bit of a stretch.

Okay, how much of a stretch? If they would have stuck a nowhere-near-production ready battery and drivetrain system into the Nikola trucks and pretended it was complete, that would have been fine? That probably wouldn't have been difficult, but equally fraudulent.

I don't think "Other companies have made fraudulent claims too" is a valid defense. The federal government choosing to go after a company that has delivered on less of its claims seems reasonable given limited resources to prosecute this sort of thing.

Especially as Tesla has done a great job of going right up to the border on misleading claims, and even stepped its toes over the line a bit, but not in a way that would be as easy to prosecute as the more blatant Nikola.

Plenty to criticize Tesla and Elon about, to be sure, but a lot of Elon's predictions have turned out to be true at least when it comes to passenger vehicles. What they've done with the EV market for consumers is nothing short of remarkable. Obviously Solar and Semi are a different matter.

Tesla was run by a technical founder (Stanford PhD pedigree fwiw) that knows his shit (though a bit crazy and prone to exaggeration and hyperbole) and the company has some of the best engineers in the world employed there.

Nikola was founded by a dude with zero technical background who as far as anyone can tell had no serious engineering expertise in-house. He even hired his brother--a guy who used to install carpets--to run Nikola's hydrogen infrastructure.

These two companies aren't even in the same league imo

>Tesla was run by a technical founder (Stanford PhD pedigree fwiw) that knows his shit (though a bit crazy and prone to exaggeration and hyperbole)

Musk was not a Stanford PhD nor a founder, if that's who you are referring to. If you can point me to any evidence of either that doesn't come from him, I'll be happy to stand corrected.

>He even hired his brother--a guy who used to install carpets--to run Nikola's hydrogen infrastructure.

Can you tell me what Kimball's qualifications are for sitting on the Tesla board?

I mean, I agree, the Nikola story is hilarious and stupid. But somehow other companies get away with what is the same thing. Milton didn't get to claim "aspiration", or that the trucks will "eventually" work.

Even if you draw the funny arbitrary line of “Elon wasn’t a founder” - the previous founders were technical as well. But taking Tesla from a lotus kit, to the brand it is today makes me think he really is a founder.

No comment on the Stanford piece, though it seems believable…

Legally he is a founder. https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/tesla-ceo-settles-for-...

Kimball doesn't run part of the infrastructure.

You sound like someone who writes SeekingAlpha FUD articles.

>You sound like someone who writes SeekingAlpha FUD articles.

I suppose the HN rules go out the window when we are defending Musk.

>Kimball doesn't run part of the infrastructure.

He's on the board. What are his qualifications.

>Legally he is a founder

Yes, a billionaire paid money so that people like you could claim he's a "founder". Is that what founder means to you? Laughable.

According to Wikipedia, Musk was accepted to a Stanford PhD. As acceptance is the hardest, most competitive and therefore most distinguished part of any elite university, that in itself is a meaningful signal. Parent poster also never said he has a PhD, but that he has the pedigree, i.e. got through the hardest part.

>According to Wikipedia, Musk was accepted to a Stanford PhD

Oh I've heard. Great story. Is it true? There's a lot of finely crafted mythology around the man.

Lol so Elon has faked his Stanford PhD and no one in the world has dared step forward to call him out? There are literally dozens of people who could prove this wrong if it's false. This is qanon level conspiracy theory.

you're clearly just a deranged person with some weird obsession about Elon.

Basically the polar opposite of the Elon Cultists.

>Musk was not a Stanford PhD nor a founder, if that's who you are referring to. If you can point me to any evidence of either that doesn't come from him, I'll be happy to stand corrected.

Musk was accepted and enrolled into a Material Science PhD at Stanford. He dropped out to be an entrepreneur. Really not sure why you are being pedantic here. The point is he has the technical chops as evidenced by being in a Stanford engineering PhD program. Trevor had absolutely nothing.

>Can you tell me what Kimball's qualifications are for sitting on the Tesla board?

It's spelled Kimbal, as long as we are being pedantic and all.

And board members of large public companies, and even startups, generally have ZERO operational control within the company.

This seems, quite different than Trevor's Fuck-up brother literally running hydrogen infrastructure for his company.

I really don't see why you are so obsessed with shitting on Tesla or defending Nikola here. There is a big fucking difference between Tesla and the Nikola fraud, and it was obvious from the start.

I browse through a lot of niche investing social media groups. One of the more liked posts on a Nikola investment group was, "If "they" cared about the future, the earth and the renewable energy issue, they would let whatever Trevor did slide."

Surprisingly, I saw similar posts about Musk on the Thailand rescuer tweet and the price too high tweet. You are not betting against the fundamentals or the realities of the stock, you are betting against these people.

Something can be true in one case and not true in another.

Nikola looked like fraud from the start (no Silicon Valley funds invested iirc - money came from Detroit).

Elon Musk is obviously different.

Silicon Valley is choke full of fraud and absurd valuations.

When you look at the actual fraud (like Theranos) silicon valley funds are nowhere near it. The people that get duped are usually outsiders that are more easily manipulated.

It can be hard to tell the difference between big ideas and bullshit, they can often sound similar. Con-artists will mimic the people that actually know their shit.

In order to tell the difference you need to actually look at the underlying tech for yourself.

> Con-artists will mimic the people that actually know their shit.

Ah yes. A certain billionaire promises robo-taxis and full Level 5 autonomy by 2020, and then in 2021, admits self-driving is hard as FSD is still Level 2, after duping their own customers on buying ahead of their 'promises'.

This billionaire in 2019, surely knew what he was talking about. /s

> In order to tell the difference you need to actually look at the underlying tech for yourself.

Like the deceptive advertisement of FSD (Full Self Driving) auto-pilot software in Tesla cars that has tricked many Tesla drivers into paying for a product that not only doesn't work as advertised, but puts the safety of drivers and others at risk.

The worst part is that they continue to market it regardless of the missed deadlines, the safety risks and the fact that the software is still 'safe' for usage, which that is complete bullshit.

The FSD feature in Tesla cars (along side the robotaxis) was deceptively advertised as 'safe' and promised as 'Level 5' with lots of customers buying into it; and some have lost their lives over the software getting confused. If FSD is not regarded as 'actual fraud' or 'deceptively advertised', then I don't know what is.

FSD was advertised as paying for something that would come in the future - I bought it under that assumption (and so did everyone I know that has it). That was and remains true.

They've continued to make progress towards it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6bOwQdCJrc

Autopilot is different and isn't advertised as level 5 - 'autopilot' implies fancy lane keeping not turn by turn point to point autonomy.

Elon's FSD timelines were wrong - that isn't fraud. People say everything he's trying to do won't work constantly, just because they're occasionally right doesn't validate all of the times they're wrong (e.g. Model 3 is vaporware will never ship, the company is bankrupt and will close in two weeks, the Model S will never ship, gigafactory is a mistake, roadster means Musk only cares about EVs for the rich etc. etc.)

If you can't tell the difference between Elon Musk and the success of Tesla and SpaceX or think it's equivalent to something like Theranos or Nikola I'm not sure what to say about that, there's just not much point in further discussion. Your pejorative use of billionaire also suggests some political element.

I think Trevor was counting on people not being able to tell the difference. They named their Tesla-competing company “Nikola,” which is a bit astounding when you think of it.

And Elizabeth Holmes wore black turtle necks - subtlety is not what they’re usually going for.

Trevor does have some 30+ million dollar ranch in Utah though so I guess he did a better job of it.

In Holmes case I genuinely think it didn't start as a fraud, but became one when they started lying. Not sure about Nikola.

> In Holmes case I genuinely think it didn't start as a fraud

Anyone thinking you can do statistically accurate blood testing from one drop of dirty fingertip capillary blood without having already made a major scientific breakthrough is certainly not thinking straight, if not outright being fraudulent

> FSD was advertised as paying for something that would come in the future

So the software that is called 'FSD' (Full Self Driving) doesn't actually mean what is says or was advertised then? You're telling me that it doesn't mean 'Full Self Driving' or what was meant to be 'full Level 5 autonomy' which that was advertised for completion in 2019 and 2020? [0]

We are in 2021. Where are the robotaxis then? [0]

> If you can't tell the difference between...

Irrelevant. Stay on point. I have only criticized Tesla's deceptive advertising of FSD where that poses a great safety risk of life to both the driver of the car and other drivers on the road. No where did I mention anything generally about Tesla, SpaceX or anything else since the last sentence you said was completely irrelevant.

FSD does not work as advertised neither it is reliable to be used on the road and it puts the safety of the Tesla driver and others drivers at risk, even especially as it is beta software. I would not use such software in a car that confuses the moon as a yellow traffic light. [1]

> Your pejorative use of billionaire also suggests some political element.

So both Elon Musk or Trevor Milton are not billionaires? So I am not allowed to say they are billionaires? What wrong with that? It is a fact, not 'some political element'.

I don't always listen to everything that they say whether if it is Milton or Musk.

[0] https://www.motortrend.com/news/tesla-autonomous-driving-lev...

[1] https://twitter.com/JordanTeslaTech/status/14184133078625853...

> So the software that is called 'FSD' (Full Self Driving) doesn't actually mean what is says or was advertised then?

There is no FSD today the capability you're paying for is a future update, it used to be entirely that - now they include some extra features under FSD that aren't in base autopilot (lane changes, etc.).

They've always been pretty explicit about this - the language on the site today reads:

> The currently enabled features require active driver supervision and do not make the vehicle autonomous. The activation and use of these features are dependent on achieving reliability far in excess of human drivers as demonstrated by billions of miles of experience, as well as regulatory approval, which may take longer in some jurisdictions. As these self-driving features evolve, your car will be continuously upgraded through over-the-air software updates.

They've also shipped more features toward this goal over time which is what they said they'd do (including a free hardware update if you had paid ahead for FSD).

> We are in 2021. Where are the robotaxis then? [0]

I already conceded he was wrong about timelines.

> Irrelevant. Stay on point.

Not irrelevant - this is the comparison we're talking about the nature of the difference between Trevor Milton and Elon Musk. If you ignore contradictory evidence because it doesn't support your position that's just cherry picking.

> So I am not allowed to say they are billionaires?

>> Ah yes. A certain billionaire promises...

>> This billionaire in 2019, surely...

Do the above quotes sound like some neutral descriptor to you?

> Not irrelevant - this is the comparison we're talking about the nature of the difference between Trevor Milton and Elon Musk. If you ignore contradictory evidence because it doesn't support your position that's just cherry picking.

What difference? Unless of course, the case of Tesla's deceptive advertising of its beta FSD system putting the lives of drivers at risk and killing them or others [0] is 'far more serious' than Nikola's deceptive advertising of their whole business. Then yes, I agree on that difference and both must be under very close investigation by the regulators.

More specifically, I'm sure you should also realize that I was criticizing both of them from the start and not 'cherry picking' or siding with any company or person, unlike you mentioning Musk's other companies which that is completely irrelevant.

> They've also shipped more features toward this goal over time which is what they said they'd do.

Despite this, it is still unreliable [1] and the safety risks still stands, even when the driver is behind the wheel and is attentive of what is in front of them.

Highlighting these risks is extremely important such that it is the difference between life or death and it can be from a malfunction in the software that controls the car.

> Do the above quotes sound like some neutral descriptor to you?

Excuse me?

It is an objective fact. Isn't it? [2] [3] Why do you feel offended of this fact? I'm sure the customers will listen to them because they think they know what they are talking about? Don't they?

>>> Con-artists will mimic the people that actually know their shit. [4]

Remember this?

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/05/business/tesla-autopilot-...

[1] https://twitter.com/JordanTeslaTech/status/14184133078625853...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trevor_Milton

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27999706

You claimed deceptive advertising - now you’re switching to a different argument about safety and risk, which I think is also wrong. None of your stuff is in good faith though so there’s no point to more discussion.

> You claimed deceptive advertising - now you’re switching to a different argument about safety and risk, which I think is also wrong.

It is both as I have always said. So you think it's worth putting the lives of other drivers at risk whilst using beta software that was deceptively advertised as "Full Self Driving" (FSD) by Tesla Inc. even when it is shown to be still not ready, than a company (Nikola Motors Corp.) and their CEO that is also deceptively advertising their entire products and technologies to investors?

What is the difference exactly on the lies and fraudulent claims made by both of them? There are none.

So your claim that:

> Elon Musk is obviously different. [0]

Is false. There are no exceptions.

Perhaps the only difference is that one involves a risk of death which that is irreversible and 'far more serious' than the other which I believe that both companies and their CEOs should be under serious investigation over their claims in their products.

Read all the comments again, since at this point you have ignored all of them since you are still defending the indefensible.

> None of your stuff is in good faith though so there’s no point to more discussion.

Are you now able to admit that the advertising of the FSD system and the fact that it is no where near 'Full Self Driving' capability which was bought in by Tesla customers also does not work or function as advertised?

On top of that, using a beta product that may get confused of malfunction poses a serious risk of death and has killed drivers or other passengers in the past, needs to be under through serious investigation by the regulators?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27998552

I am dumbfounded how you don't find it bothersome to call it Full-Self Driving today when they are not even remotely close to creating FSD.

FDS is beyond a difficult problem. The margin of error so low that you simply don't get there by tweaking some settings.

They're not just 'tweaking some settings': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6bOwQdCJrc

What they have today isn't FSD (which they state explicitly), but I'm happy to give them extra money early given the work they're doing on the chance that it works in the future. I think they have the best chance of success of actually shipping something real.

>I'm happy to give them extra money early given the work they're doing on the chance that it works in the future.

You're a good mark, FSD is a mug's game.

> So both Elon Musk or Trevor Milton are not billionaires? So I am not allowed to say they are billionaires? What wrong with that? It is a fact, not 'some political element'.

You're telling others to stay on point yet your pointing out that Musk and Milton are billionaires is just as much beside the point.

Context:

> Elon Musk is obviously different. [0]

> Con-artists will mimic the people that actually know their shit. [1]

When it comes to how the FSD system works, should I listen to a billionaire CEO or multiple leading experts in the field?

Unfortunately, the influence of any billionaire CEO (especially one with a rare cult of personality) is far more greater than someone who is simply an 'expert' or 'researcher' in their field. I would rather verify the claims of the CEO to check if what they are claiming doesn't conflict with what the experts and researchers are showing.

Otherwise, the customers will trust anything they say and if not done with proper research, well it goes straight back to [1].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27998552

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27999706

Does it matter if the product is superior and does not cause backlash even with the overstated feature?

I mean seriously, if the Tesla owners club was crying and planning class action on this, we would have a different conversation but I don't really see that happening as FSD is just vapor ware at the moment.

> When you look at the actual fraud (like Theranos) silicon valley funds are nowhere near it. The people that get duped are usually outsiders that are more easily manipulated.

might not have been valley insiders, but if you look at theranos bizarre board selection, they were certainly not just random joes and certainly had the wherewithal to know they needed do proper due diligence before attaching themselves to the fraud, unless of course they were also party to it...

Why do you think Elon Musk is obviously different? He's definitely had many events where he has lied about aspects of his business. You could argue that it doesn't matter now that he has built something real, but that's down to a lot of luck, not ethical backbone.

Musk has built many things over the past Many years. Though he may talk about even more, bringing EVs to the masses and creating reusable rockets is something he deserves full credit for. It has nothing to do with ethics. A rational person would not equate Musk with Milton.

Not equate, realize that they are both part of a pattern.

We also should not let Elon Musk's actions only be evaluated in their totality. We can argue about the net sum of his contributions, but it should be fundamentally irrelevant to evaluating any individual one. He shouldn't lie or allow fraud. His actions with the Solar Roof launch, Boring Company, Self Driving, and funding tweets all cross ethical lines that we as a country need to make clear are not what we want from our business leaders.

The fact that Tesla is not entirely vapourware doesn't mean that Musk hasn't lied or even committed fraud to get here. Lying to investors to fund a billion dollar company that is actually worth a few hundred million is not that different from funding one that is worth 0 dollars.

You are still betting against the product those people are building. Their sentiment doesn’t matter much when the product weak and company is committing fraud for personal gain or to bolster the promises of the product, like Thernos, most (not all of the time, by any means) of the time history has dealt with this.

I think the poster meant the irrational investors, as opposed to the CEO/owner, when they used "they".

This is why this idiotic trend towards gender neutral pronouns is so... idiotic. 90% of the time when it's used, it's confusing and makes the information you're trying to convey harder to get. In this case the op wasn't even using gender neutral shenaningans, but since it's 2021 and it's becoming relatively ubiquitous, we get this kind of confusion.

But if the two people have the same gender, why would using gendered pronouns make it less confusing?

Sure, I guess it is less ambiguous on average..

Hm.

It'll get easier the longer it persists. Just be patient.

Heck, Japanese very rarely need a pronoun at all, yet they can somehow infer meaning just fine.

No, it won't get any easier. When you use "they", you are in fact losing information. If I say "he" or "she", the amount of information I'm portraying is, and always will be, greater than a "neutral" pronoun can convey.

Information is lost. I concur. But it will get easier (than now).

If thou dost not agree, thy children may.

Perhaps my rudeness at using the familial second person with a stranger was lost. I hope so. I didn't mean to be rude. Rather to demonstrate that the English language is better for having not preserved that unnecessary distinction.

I’ve learned to cast a more cynical eye towards companies claiming to be accomplishing grand, ethical aims. Sometimes they’re right, of course, but it’s also a phenomenal way to sweep abuse and fraud under a rug.

> I’ve learned to cast a more cynical eye towards companies claiming to be accomplishing grand, ethical aims.

People have stopped talking about Google's famed "Don't be Evil" thing.. But hey, it served a purpose for Google when it mattered.

It is really depressing that honor and integrity means nothing.

Do whatever you want and while claiming the opposite. If it blows up, hire a specialized PR company and pretend nothing happened.

It also helped that Google, by-and-large, were doing extremely good things. For all the complaints about the (very real) problems the internet has today, I think people have lost sight of how much the internet sucked in 1997.

There's a website you loved, but you forgot the URL? Good luck ever finding that again. Want to watch a video? Hope you've got an updated QuickTime plug-in and a lot of time to wait for the shitty webhost to serve a 240p video at 80B/s. Your daughter just emailed you a few photos of your grandchildren? Better delete the last 5 years of your conversation history to make space for it - Hotmail and Yahoo! only offered 10MB of storage before Gmail launched with 100x that. Want to monetise your blog? Hope you're happy with your readers getting malware, because every ad service out there is insanely shady.

"...villains who twirl their moustaches are easy to spot. Those who clothe themselves in good deeds are well camouflaged." -- Captain Jean-Luc Picard

It's part of the fraud triangle studied in most business schools:

"The fraud triangle is a framework commonly used in auditing to explain the reason behind an individual’s decision to commit fraud. The fraud triangle outlines three components that contribute to increasing the risk of fraud: (1) opportunity, (2) incentive, and (3) rationalization."

https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com/resources/knowledge/ac...

Companies that are "saving the world" are rife with people willing to rationalize their behavior. That's why it is imperative they are scrutinized properly so that the other elements don't also become rampant. We've failed completely with that on the latest wave of greentech companies.

I'm not sure creating a multibillion dollar vaporware fraud shell company and being a dick on Twitter are comparable sins.

I'm not sure you are following the Elon-Solar City case if you think Elon's only sin is being a dick on Twitter. Or the original $420 funding a share saga.

Elon Musk's repeated fake-it-till-you-make-it behavior and the unwillingness of regulators to crack down on it spawns Trevor Miltons.

This has been going on since time immemorial. A part of me thinks it's a necessary evil in a world where people won't fund revolutionary ideas. However, that also means Milton and Holmes etc.

I would agree that fraud is always going to happen; how much though is up for debate, and I would tend to argue that more fraud makes the world worse at funding revolutionary ideas. More revolutionary ideas happen and get funded in the US, which while I believe has become rife with fraud over the past decade, is no where near the scale the number of frauds in China or Africa or less well monitored markets.

Trust is fundamental part of markets and is basically its own interest rate. The more people can trust one another, the riskier investments people are willing to partake in.

The SEC did enforce against tesla - when Elon tweeted "Tesla’s stock price is too high imo" - they began an investigation and subpoenaed records because they felt this this had not been approved by attorneys (it wasn't - elon claimed it was his personal opinion). So they went after him for this.

They also went after him for a lot of other stuff.

Note that they haven't gone after folks for failure to deliver issues on sales which is usually caused by shorting stocks such as Tesla's and others. Even though you'd think the basics of a regulated market is that folks selling shares actually own and will deliver them if someone buys them.

> They also went after him for a lot of other stuff.

Like lying about a buyout offer for his company. Which he received a incredibly small punishment for.

Are you sure he was lying?

I mean, similarly to my certainty Donald Trump was lying that his taxes are under audit, and thats why he can't release them. Do I have exact knowledge of Elon's head state, no, but I can make inferences from all his actions since. If a buyer truly existed to facilitate that transaction, that would be public knowledge at this point.

If you muck in the private equity world at all you'd know that this isn't true at all. Lots of deals and nearly deals happen everyday and they only reach the public sphere if the parties want it too.

This was an $100 billion deal at the time. It would have been the largest LBO of all time. If there hasn't been any institution revealed to have been financing it at this point then there wasn't one.

I think it was pretty clear that he was thinking about Saudi / middle east / Norwegian / sovereign wealth type funding on equity side. Then debt for rest if needed.

These funds are looking to diversify away from oil - so for them a play in EV space makes sense.

The Saudis in particular planned to do an IPO in oil industry - but that ended up not happening which really changed their decision making. If it had they were explicit about desire to diversify (smart in my view).

It wasn't a $100B deal. Many larger investors would rolled their holdings into the private entity - Elon alone would have. $40 - $50B. If debt is in mix equity portion even smaller. It would have been the deal of the century.

"Saudi’s Public Investment Fund built the undisclosed stake of between 3 and 5 per cent of Tesla’s shares this year, according to people with direct knowledge of the matter.

At Tesla’s current share price the position is worth between $1.7bn and $2.9bn. The stake, which is below the 5 per cent threshold that requires public disclosure, makes the PIF one of Tesla’s eight biggest shareholders, according to Bloomberg data.

The PIF, which has more than $250bn in assets, initially approached Tesla and chief executive Elon Musk to express interest in purchasing newly issued shares in the electric vehicle company.

However, Tesla did not act on the interest, one person informed on the matter said. Instead, the Saudi state fund acquired the position in secondary markets with the help of JPMorgan."

- Financial Times.

Someone's just chased down $2B of your stock on SECONDARY market - yeah - that's actually more interest than many deal talks even get to.

And yes - discussions like this happen with some frequency - and it's not a scandal if the deal doesn't close - you just don't usually read about them. Elon says he wanted to talk to Apple about buying tesla as well, he's on twitter more than most. That said, folks on the deal side - there tends to be movement in stock prices 3 days before deals are announced - so someone is making money on the normally secret considerations.

> I think it was pretty clear that he was thinking about Saudi / middle east / Norwegian / sovereign wealth type funding on equity side. Then debt for rest if needed.

He was "thinking"? That's not funding secured. Why have all of these institutions specifically denied having discussed it at the time too? Either it wasn't these institutions, or funding was very far from secure at the time he claimed it was.

> It wasn't a $100B deal. Many larger investors would rolled their holdings into the private entity - Elon alone would have. $40 - $50B. If debt is in mix equity portion even smaller. It would have been the deal of the century.

If you are going to get investors for something like this, you're also going to roll over all the debt/options that you have on your books as well. It would have been close to ~100 billion, the largest LBO ever done.

> And yes - discussions like this happen with some frequency - and it's not a scandal if the deal doesn't close - you just don't usually read about them.

You don't read about them because the CEO doesn't announce they secured funding for one in the middle of trading. You know, the responsible thing to do.

Call me pessimistic, but my thoughts on the matter is that TSLA and by association Musk have become too big to fail. Anything that would take Musk down would harm a lot of very wealthy investors.

There are people looking to take him down along with SpaceX / Tesla etc. Others are glad to have someone powering ahead relative to competition in places like China etc. We will see how it plays out.

As you are probably aware, buyout offers are routinely front run on the street by insiders. Ie, folks in the know get in early and book nice gains. So some folks actually liked hearing direct from CEO on what they were thinking. His twitter post was clear, he was "considering" taking TSLA private.

His blog post on the rationale for his potential move is here: https://www.tesla.com/blog/taking-tesla-private

Anyone who bought in at this news would have been buying in for < $84 per share (split adjusted). Current stock price is 600 per share+.

The problem the SEC has had in trying to charge him is that folks feel like the SEC really ignore some of the clear scam behavior by big players. Fail to deliver? No issue. Broker bad behavior and theft? Light FINRA slaps on the wrist. Complaints about Madoff? Investigate the complainers. CEO talking about potential to take a company private publically - all out WAR by SEC!

He said he is considering something. It was not definite. Stock price didn't jump to the "buyout" price the way it normally would on a real buyout. So we have clear market data that folks didn't not consider his tweets a statement that a buyout was occuring.

Yes - people want to make this into a huge crime. But he explained in his tweets pretty transparently to most what his thinking was.

And they did go after him for this and everything else. Hey says Stock price too high in his opinion - BAM - they were on him. And they went after him for this.

if you read between lines - the contempt court case got a bit of an eye roll from the judge involved.

> His twitter post was clear, he was "considering" taking TSLA private.

$420 funding secure indicates he already had financing ready. Why has this mystery funder never materialized.

> Anyone who bought in at this news would have been buying in for < $84 per share (split adjusted). Current stock price is 600 per share+.

This is hugely problematic as a response. Elon Musk's behavior is unethical whether Tesla stock went up or down. The stock price should not be used as justification for previous lies. If we accept that, then we accept markets where people can gamble on a lie and things are fine if their gamble works out. That's not the business culture I want to create. People should be honest about risks so that they can be properly evaluated.

> The problem the SEC has had in trying to charge him is that folks feel like the SEC really ignore some of the clear scam behavior by big players.

Elon Musk is literally the second biggest player! Ignoring his malfeasance creates more people willing to emulate him.

> Fail to deliver? No issue. Broker bad behavior and theft? Light FINRA slaps on the wrist. Complaints about Madoff? Investigate the complainers. CEO talking about potential to take a company private publically - all out WAR by SEC!

You won't find me giving a kind word to the SEC's currently regulatory practices, but we need to recognize that corporate culture is made from examples. When someone like Elon Musk publicly flouts all responsible corporate behavior, and doesn't have an example made of him, then that is going to breed people willing to make the exact same decisions.

> He said he is considering something. It was not definite.

"Funding secured" is definite.

> Yes - people want to make this into a huge crime. But he explained in his tweets pretty transparently to most what his thinking was.

It is a huge crime. In the middle of trading, he decided to fraudulently claim he had a buyout offer for his company. That screws over not just short sellers, but any one who had calls above the $420 a share price. There is no universe where that is healthy for our markets.

> if you read between lines - the contempt court case got a bit of an eye roll from the judge involved.

He's currently in a court case for his buyout of Solar City, where he announced a fake product, used it as reasoning for his one public company to buy a company that he, his brother, and his cousin's had the largest stake in, and he, his brother, and his other companies (Tesla and SpaceX) were the largest bondholders in. This is a cartoonish set of conflicts of interest here. But apparently that shouldn't matter, because "stock price."

No one has been confused I don't think. I saw the considering the $420 buyout, I took it to mean just that.

The short sellers around tesla have been pathetic. Note I don't own any tesla stock, but the short seller hype train is just ridiculous around tesla. How there has been no action there is mind boggling.

He's a crazy guy willing to take crazy risks - look at SpaceX -> they are operating COMPLETELY outside all norms.

Despite these "huge crimes" - no prosecutor anywhere is prosecuting. The SEC efforts basically fell pretty flat - their contempt attempts also fell flat.

The conflicts with solar city were crazy - they were also public. I thought it was a terrible deal - but that was public too. If you think Elon is bad for tesla and you own stock vote him out by running your own board slate. But he has a vision for a fully integrated solar and powerwall type product no barriers. You get an app, the sun charges the battery. They had and have ideas around charging cars mixed into that. Not sure if it's a good idea - plenty of competitors coming for Tesla, but they may be able to deliver something here with their solar / energy AND car companies. And the trend is towards this type of integration - so he gets to take a crack at it.

And a heads up, if these solar city folks win their case - guess who is going to get the money. Yes, TESLA! I've followed the case a bit. Not super impressive (aside from the plaintiffs attorneys vomiting in court! What was going on!).

Importantly, you are Elon, you own 22% of two companies - Tesla and SolarCity with highly overlapping missions. You want to integrate solar / energy / cars. I mean, what would YOU do. Go do a deal with some company in China the way others have tried? These folks saying it's such a bad idea / deal - what was their much better proposal? Elon already knew the Solarcity board and management etc etc. I really am curious what was the amazingly better option to get where Elon wanted to go. Easy to criticize, harder (much) to do.

I think you've hit the nail on the head.

The Battery-Solar-Car angle is such an obvious integration for Tesla. I guess on paper it is frustrating it was a family connection, but their alternative was for Tesla to start building their own Solar capability when they had a significant stake in one already.

SEC is a joke - chasing Elon is like a weird hobby for them... meanwhile things like 2008 happen and they shrug and go "Sorry, we missed that one"... What's their mission again?

Sure, battery solar goes together, but why did they need to specifically buy his conflict of interest failing one instead of another solar company? Because he had leveraged investments in it and even mixed SpaceX into it having them use NASA money to buy SolarCity bonds. Crazy self-dealing and ultimately fraud with the fake shingle demo and claims.

Pretty sure Solar is a big part of energy generation in Space related stuff.

So I can obviously see the self dealing side… but there is also an equally “it just made sense” side. Do billionaires need to self enrich with crazy side deals?

Solar city had nothing to do with space solar, and if they did bonds don't give access to the tech anyway. It was residential (contracted?) install and financialization of the deal and payback terms.

I wish folks saying they should have bought X company would actually name X company. Seriously - what was the company they should have purchased.

Elon already owned basically 22% of both companies. After they did the stock deal he owned 22% or whatever of the combined company. He already knew the folks / board / management of both companies.

Can you name the company he "should" have purchased?

Funding secure means one and only one thing: that he had secured funding. He didn't have it. He lied.

> No one has been confused I don't think. I saw the considering the $420 buyout, I took it to mean just that.

Clearly options traders didn't, since all options above $420 went to zero.

> The short sellers around tesla have been pathetic. Note I don't own any tesla stock, but the short seller hype train is just ridiculous around tesla. How there has been no action there is mind boggling.

I disagree. I think the behavior of the stock holders have been pathetic. The short sellers demands for greater transparency and a company not entirely based on smoke and mirrors are easily met. The company itself has refused to meet those minimal standards.

> He's a crazy guy willing to take crazy risks - look at SpaceX -> they are operating COMPLETELY outside all norms.

So? This shouldn't be an excuse for fraudulent behavior. Everytime I bring up a specific problematic behavior of Elon Musk, someone wants to reframe the conversation around the totality of his behavior, rather than the single criticism. I don't know about rockets, but from what I hear, Elon has done a great deal for him. Good for him. That doesn't make any of his behaviors faking a buyout ok, his behavior in the SolarCity merger, or his behavior with the Boring Company.

If we want better businessmen, we have to hold the ones we have accountable. Continuing to refuse to do that for Elon is spawning generations of people like Trevor Milton who assume laws don't apply if you're charming enough.

> The conflicts with solar city were crazy - they were also public. I thought it was a terrible deal - but that was public too. If you think Elon is bad for tesla and you own stock vote him out by running your own board slate. But he has a vision for a fully integrated solar and powerwall type product no barriers. You get an app, the sun charges the battery. They had and have ideas around charging cars mixed into that. Not sure if it's a good idea - plenty of competitors coming for Tesla, but they may be able to deliver something here with their solar / energy AND car companies. And the trend is towards this type of integration - so he gets to take a crack at it.

He lied to shareholders about both SolarCity's financial state and faked a product in order to secure the merger. You can say, "these are public companies" all you want, but the public companies voted for the merger purely on Elon's word, which apparently isn't worth much.

> Importantly, you are Elon, you own 22% of two companies - Tesla and SolarCity with highly overlapping missions. You want to integrate solar / energy / cars. I mean, what would YOU do. Go do a deal with some company in China the way others have tried? These folks saying it's such a bad idea / deal - what was their much better proposal? Elon already knew the Solarcity board and management etc etc. I really am curious what was the amazingly better option to get where Elon wanted to go. Easy to criticize, harder (much) to do.

Not fake a product and lie about the financial status of my company. You know, the bare minimum.

Lets see some of the quotes and think if we could get away with it...

Aug 7, 2018 "Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured." Elon Musk

Aug 7, 2018 "Shareholders could either to sell at 420 or hold shares & go private"

After paying 20 million dollar fine referring to the Securities and Exchange Commission tweets:

"Just want to that the Shortseller Enrichment Commission is doing incredible work," "And the name change is so on point!"

2018

"I want to be clear: I do not respect the SEC, I do not respect them,"

2019

“By the middle of next year, we’ll have over a million Tesla cars on the road with full self-driving hardware, feature complete, at a reliability level that we would consider that no one needs to pay attention,”

October 21, 2019

"Next year for sure, we will have over a million robotaxis on the road," "The fleet wakes up with an over-the-air update. That's all it takes."

2020

"All Tesla cars right now have everything necessary for self-driving available today. All you need to do is improve the software."

What's wrong with the latest statement?

Technically all cars have a proper GPU (Tesla's "GPU") and 360 cameras, the reliability is probably in the 90%-99% (which, yes, is pretty terrible to be considered fully autonomous, but impressive from a technical standpoint). Technically is correct to say that all they have to do is to "improve the software". That will be a lot of work, sweat and tears, but still correct.

Until it actually works, how can you say the hardware is sufficient?

Historically, there have been significant bottlenecks on algorithms, I'd argue software plays a bigger role than hardware; especially during inference.

Going back to AlexNet, while GPUs helped the training process, it included significant software improvements that made a huge difference: training with dropout, convolutional neural networks, using rectified linear units, etc.

Also, training hardware is much more relevant than hardware for inference. Tesla's cars do not include hardware to train the neural network but just for inference. The training hardware is actually a server cluster that Tesla owns. So if hardware is insufficient, Tesla might have to buy a larger training cluster, but not necessarily upgrade the inference hardware.

That say, I do agree that there is some risk in requiring a hardware upgrade for inference, but to me that seems very unlikely.

so, you're saying it doesn't work then?

Correct! I'm saying FSD only works on 90%-99% of cases, which is currently insufficient to be actually considered FSD. Keyword, currently.

However, I'm NOT stating that this won't ever work. I do believe that FSD will work in the future. Are there risks? For sure. But I'm very optimistic.

I'm trying to communicate that, even with current in-car hardware, this should be sufficient. Why? Cause driving the car with a neural-network is actually quite trivial. Now, training the neural-model is actually REALLY hard. But the training does not happen in the car, car just collects data and sends it to a data center with GPUs that trains the network. If any hardware will need upgrade, is the data center were training happens, not the actual in-car hardware.

Are you really saying that FSD will never work? Cause that's a pretty bold claim.

I'd add, we can be more specific about what a "case" is. I'd say, a trip might describe this better. As in, 90-99% of trips FSD Beta 9 will take you there without interventions. That's still lame, but still quite impressive. Achieving 90-99% accuracy on trips still seemed impossible one year ago, I don't think that's the case anymore. The remaining risk is, how fast can this improve between 99% to 99.9% and then to 99.99%, etc.

The reasonable expectation is that cars will not be able to achieve actual self-driving without either AGI or more specialized hardware than a camera. AGI is almost certainly a 'next century' kind of technology. Adding sensors other than cameras (lidar, others) to a Tesla means that they don't have the hardware.

This claim is quite obviously true, because despite the claims of Tesla's people, we don't know of any vision system that works without relying on general intelligence. Human/animal vision in particular is only accurate because we inherently use our knowledge of the world and physical intuition to resolve ambiguity. Put a human (or other mammal or a bird) in a fully artifical environment, without recognizable objects and without shadows, and you'll see that they are about as bad at vision and navigation tasks as many current algorithms. The effect will be even worse if you recreate realistic objects but with unrealistic proportions and behaviors.

Since we can't hope that computers will gain animal level intelligence in understanding the world (no one is even really working on the necessary problems), the only path to self driving is through more advanced sensors, as everyone but Tesla has realized for a long time. This is why Waymo has self-driving cars on the road today (in perfect ideal conditions), and Teslas can sometimes barely navigate an empty intersection without a human driver intervening.

> I'm saying FSD only works on 90%-99% of cases

This is an extremely bold claim. You're also ignoring the fact that driving is an extremely heavy tailed distribution. We know that both processing heavy tailed distributions is difficult (not training, but pre-processing) as well as we see a strong correlation between larger networks and performance on heavy tailed distributions (more normal like distributions can get away with substantially smaller networks). But larger networks means more MACs. More MACs means slower inference. There's still a tradeoff between accuracy and speed. In driving you need both.

> Are you really saying that FSD will never work?

No one here is saying that. Everyone here is calling you out on your BS that we _know_ that FSD will work on _current_ hardware. We don't _know_ that. Maybe it will, but it's not a pony I'm willing to put money on.

Because the claim can't be backed by evidence. There's still a camera alone vs camera +lidar debate. But besides that it's not hard to imagine that the neural net needed to process whatever vision you need isn't powerful enough, so you need next generation GPUs/TPUs/whatever-Us. We just don't know until it's been done. But we know that the more frames you can process per second the better. We do know that the more resolution an image has the more information it has and the higher potential accuracy a network has (if you're following ViTs you'll notice people are upping the image resolution and getting better classification results).

So it's a bold claim given what we know. It's also clear that next generation hardware will be safer regardless of if the previous generation "works."

AI algorithms are split into training and inference.

Training is the process of generating the parameters for the neural network, it usually takes significant resources to train and is a very hard process.

Inference is the process of using a pre-trained neural network to perform predictions.

Tesla's car have hardware to perform inference. From working on the field for several years, I do believe that they have hardware capable of performing inference (driving a car).

However, the hardware that trains the neural network is comprised of hundreds, if not thousands or tens of thousands of GPUs, that hardware lives in Tesla's data centers (or some other cloud provider).

The really hard part of this project is on training, not inference. So while there is some risk that the car (inference) hardware might require an upgrade, this seems very unlikely to me.

Thanks? I'm a ML researcher. I thought the comment about ViTs would have been a dead giveaway. Is this nerd-splaining? Because it is really demeaning and you're missing the entire point.

While you're right, inference is not training but accuracy and inference speed is still important and hardware dependent. YOLO still can be faster and more accurate. Everything I said still holds true. You want to do inference on larger images because larger images have more information. More information helps you get better accuracy. You want bigger networks because bigger networks correlate strongly with higher accuracy. If you read any object detection paper you will see different sized models showing these tradeoffs. You want faster hardware because you still want your algorithms to be fast. Inference is still done in the car. Better hardware still makes all that perform better.

> The really hard part of this project is on training, not inference.

If you pay attention to the YOLO series or other real time object detection you will know that inference is still something being worked on. Inference speed matters. Throughput (different metric) matters. Hardware helps with both even if we use the same pretrained network. A network will have faster inference and higher throughput on an Ampere card than on a Kepler. So I'm not sure what you're debating here, it really feels like you're just trying to tell me you know machine learning but missed strong clues that you're talking to someone else who is aware.

TLDR: hardware still matters.

So much of the discussion seems focused on images recognition; how much of the full autonomous solution is the perception problem vs other elements of driving?

From the outside I’ve wondered if the missed schedule targets around autonomous driving is because we’ve conflated “solving” the perception problem with solving self-driving. Just curious what your take is on that

> I do believe that they have hardware capable of performing inference (driving a car).

Since it has never been done we still don't know what's needed, so even if you worked in the field that's only intuition, a bit light for big commercial claims IMHO.

Since the fall of 2016, Tesla's website has said:

> "All Tesla vehicles produced in our factory, including Model 3, have the hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver."

Yet the original "HW1" computer was replaced by "HW2", which was replaced by "FSD Computer 2.5", which was replaced by "FSD Computer 3".

If you want to activate the Full Self-Driving package today on a Tesla you just bought in early 2019, they'll tell you that your "FSD Computer 2.5" is not capable enough for even today's level 2 autonomy features, you first have to replace it with "FSD Computer 3". And if your car's a bit older, but still sold as "has the hardware needed for full self-driving", you have to pay $1000 for that upgrade before you can pay for the "full self-driving" that isn't self-driving.

How many times does Tesla have to claim the hardware is good enough, but then change their minds a year later, before any reasonable person stops believing them?

Replacing hardware does not make old hardware incapable of FSD.

To give you an example, ImageNet for image classification required for many years a descent computer and GPU to run inference. Today, an improved version called MobileNet, runs in phones with no GPU from advancements in AI training with half-precision and why not.

So, how can we be so sure that FSD can't EVER be ported back to HW1?

That's some pretty impressive goal post moving there.

It doesn't matter whether it can't ever be ported back. It doesn't work today, and that's all there is to it. Musk lied. And it isn't the first time he does so either.

That's a bit harsh. Many technology products have delays, it sucks, makes customers unhappy, but is not uncommon and is not considered lying, not in my book at least. Windows Vista was delayed for many many years [1]. They actually promised a full database replacement to their file system that it never really shipped, etc. This is not to criticize them, but just to say that when ambitious goals are set, it's often the case that delays happen. You can definitely make the case that maybe it's better to release products Apple-style and just unveil them when they are ready, that would be a fair point.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_of_Windows_Vista

Although, most V1 software is released early, as an MVP (Most Viable Product), get a lot of feedback and iterate. So it's a very reasonable approach to release FSD incrementally and get early adoption and early feedback. Again, it's a pretty hard problem to solve; so even if they fail, lots of respect from me to their team for getting this far.

What will it take for you to admit that it doesn't exist?

Just like you can't be a little bit pregnant you can't have a little bit of FSD. You either have it or you don't. It's a boolean, and it's embedded in that word 'full'.

It's not harsh. He sold cars claiming they can do FSD in the near future. He claimed he will have a million robotaxis in 2020. He claimed Teslas will pay for themselves in a year's time working as taxis for you (a bold faced lie even if FSD were here today).

Windows Vista and software in general are not even remotely comparable: they are not sold today with the promise of features tomorrow - they are generally sold when they're ready. Even pre-order games are usually refunded if they incur too huge delays or ship with significantly altered features (see Cyberpunk 2020).

>So, how can we be so sure that FSD can't EVER be ported back to HW1?

Are you saying that the possibility is enough to prove they didn't cheat people?

If, some day, Tesla hypothetically says "we have determined it is technically possible to backport FSD, but we aren't gonna, because we like making money, not spending it" is that enough in your mind to demonstrate they didn't defraud anyone way back when?

Or do they actually have to make it run to fulfill the original promise?

The possibility is not enough. They have to make FSD work in older Teslas to fulfill the original promise, somehow.

That said, if it doesn't happened this year, it doesn't mean it will never happen.

The first problem they need to solve is FSD. If they can't solve FSD even with latest hardware, then well, that would be bad on its own.

The question is, what happens once they solve FSD, do they port? Maybe, I don't think it will be nearly as hard. Now realistically, it's probably cheaper to give free upgrades to everyone and not have to do the port. To me that feels fair, is like "hey, I promised you FSD on HW1, is gonna be a pain to port, but here, take this free HW upgrade", I'd be OK with that.

Now if they don't compensate HW1 users to some degree once FSD is solved, I do feel that would not be cool.

But my point here is that, we are jumping to conclusions, we don't know yet. We can't claim (yet) that FSD will or will not happen.

> MobileNet

Okay, compare accuracy of MobileNet to ViT. ViT has 90.45% accuracy and 1.843Bn parameters and MobileNet has 79% with 5.47M parameters (2020, v3 is 75% with 5.4). [0]

These two networks are nowhere near equal. If you could put ViT on a phone and run real-time inference you would. But you can't, so you take a major cut in performance to get what you can.

There are multiple metrics you need to look at when evaluating networks. "Being able to perform on a dataset" is not even that useful of one.

[0] Have fun https://paperswithcode.com/sota/image-classification-on-imag...

Had the GP quoted Elon saying this in fall 2016 then you would have an entirely valid point. But the GP did not do this. The GP dated the quote as being made in 2020, when all new cars did in fact contain HW3.

The quote is not "all Tesla cars have HW3", it's "all Tesla cars right now have everything necessary for self-driving". He said that same thing about HW2 and about HW2.5. There are no self-driving Tesla robotaxis running any computer version. It was as wrong to say it in 2020 as it was in 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019. Maybe at next month's "Tesla AI Day" (not to be confused with 2019's "Tesla Autonomy Day") he'll debut HW4 which will definitely be the one that turns your car into a robotaxi.

You appear to be misquoting. Can you please cite this 2020 quote verbatim and in context? If you can, and the context is consistent with what you have inferred, I will retract everything and offer my most generous and profuse apology.

The quote is from further up this thread we're in:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28002731

It's verbatim from Elon Musk on Autonomy Day 2019, per this article:

https://www.engadget.com/2019-04-22-tesla-elon-musk-self-dri...

This is the same event where he promised a million Tesla robotaxis on the road by 2020.

> It's verbatim from Elon Musk on Autonomy Day 2019

No, that was NOT a verbatim quote. Here is the exact quote with me adding emphasis on the critical (but oft omitted) qualifier:

"All Teslas being produced right now have this computer. We switched over from the Nvidia solution for S and X about a month ago, and we switched over the Model 3 about ten days ago. All cars being produced have the all the hardware necessary, compute and otherwise, for full self-driving. I'll say that again. All Tesla cars being produced right now have everything necessary for full self-driving. All you need to do is improve the software."

https://youtu.be/Ucp0TTmvqOE?t=5663

> This is the same event where he promised a million Tesla robotaxis on the road by 2020.

That is, in my opinion, not a contextually correct reading of what Elon said. Within the context of the speech it's clear (to me) that for him, "robotaxi" is used as shorthand for "vehicles with the hardware capable of being a robotaxi." Obviously I cannot prove this, and I recognise that responsibility ultimately lies with Elon to be clear.

I do agree Elon did say multiple sentences that are absolutely misleading when read in isolation, but his actual words in context (and with some recognition that this is a forward looking statement made with optimism) were far less egregiously wrong than the snipped quote implies on its own. You can watch him say it in context and make up your own mind:

https://youtu.be/Ucp0TTmvqOE?t=11612

The additional context around the same quote doesn't change anything as far as I can tell. They said the exact same thing about their previous computer systems, then just 1-2 years later would replace those computer systems because they were in fact not capable enough for self-driving. There's still no self-driving robotaxis on HW3 over two years later, when they promised it would exist in 2020.

Same thing with the robotaxi quotes. Elon was very clear on autonomy day and the days surrounding it. The promise was not shorthand for "vehicles capable of being a robotaxi", it was Tesla vehicles, and I quote again, "operating robotaxis next year with no one in them", and "I feel very confident predicting that there will be autonomous robotaxis from Tesla next year — not in all jurisdictions because we won’t have regulatory approval everywhere.". You don't need regulatory approval for hardware alone.

In another investor presentation Elon Musk made in 2019, per a reporter covering it, they were promising the Tesla Network to allow Tesla owners to send their functioning robotaxis out to pick people up for money would launch in 2020.

> Starting next year, owners will be able to flip a switch inside the Tesla app, and send out their car to pick up and drop off passengers autonomously, earning an estimated 65 cents per mile in fares. By Tesla’s estimates, owners might be able to earn $30,000 in gross revenue from their cars per year, or more than $300,000 in revenue over the 11-year lifespan of their car.

That’s a whole bunch of stuff I don’t necessarily disagree with, I was only responding to specific points. I am not here to defend Elon’s entire verbal history.

Not included in your response, I should note, was any acknowledgement that you misrepresented a quote as being verbatim was in fact not verbatim. This makes me entirely disinterested in further interaction.

You have no idea whether that's sufficient hardware for full self driving. Nobody does, because we don't know how to make it happen. We can't even prove that it's doable short of AGI.

So what's wrong with the statement is it fits a pattern of statements with reckless disregard for the truth.

“I’ve cured cancer, just got to finish the research. Am actively looking for investors. This is your chance to get in on the ground floor.”

The SEC tweets are of course much easier for us to get away with. The only reason they’re of any interest at all is that Elon is rich and powerful.

From my point of view as a peasant without any shares anywhere, multibillion dollar vaporware companies have very little impact. We could argue this investment could have gone into better companies who could have made the world a better place, but it's purely hypothetical (the money could have gone to a worse company, or political lobbying as well...). Basically, from afar, it's a "rich people lost some money" drama.

That’s about as valid as saying “robbing someone’s house is legal as long as the victim has a high net worth, after all, they can afford it”.

That’s not how laws and society work — theft is theft, no matter who the victim is.

That may be how "laws" work, but it's not how society works. There's a reason why "Robin Hood" is a parable. Legally, not all theft is treated the same, either - wage theft is largely ignored compared to other kinds, despite accounting for an order of magnitude greater amount.

And for that matter, not everyone agrees what theft even is. Leftist will say that wage labor is theft, and the far right will tell you taxation is theft. It's all relative.

The point was on "sins", so I didn't comment on the legal basis, but the moral one.

To me robbing someone of 1% of their capital doesn't look worse than CEOs throwing around their social weight and followers against random people for fun.

The real world consequent of the latter might actually be worse, like whole life ruined levels of worse.

Even ignoring the extremely explicit Robin Hood example that's already been pointed out, there's a hell of a lot of fiction centered around going to the lair of a dragon that does nothing but hoard gold, and killing it. Possibly you missed the subtext when reading those stories, but the gist of it is that society is totally fine with not caring about an extremely rich person losing a tiny fraction of their wealth.

What do you think funds our union pension plans?

I don't have a union pension plan, and I'd argue they should be backed by less volatile investments than "innovative" companies.

They are, generally speaking; pretty sure they're mandated by law on how much risk they are allowed to take.

But, I'm convinced the stock brokers at pension funds are also playing the market a lot, because better results is better for them.

> less volatile investments

A wise investor reduces volatility by diversification, rather than by concentrating on low-volatility assets.

A wise investor reduces downside risk by conducting due diligence research to identify frauds.

Except the low volatility “anomaly” has shown to get better risk adjusted returns than a widely diversified strategy

I don't think you can discount the fact this money could have been used more productively that easily. It could have funded a lot of jobs for ordinary working people and developed new technology. That's an awful lot of good that didn't get done. I can't point to the working people that lost out from this, but they do exist.

It's not like if without Nikola all of this money would have gone to one other thing. Sure some of it might have got wasted, but realistically most of it would have gone to productive uses.

I think the argument is that rampant fraud generally destabilizes the economy which is eventually bad for everybody

Financial markets are not coupled to real economics anymore.

They’re coupled to speculative gamesmanship. Whoever can generate statistics to captivate the masses who do not understand them, via press releases, and media blitzes.

That sounds cynical, but I “hob nob” with people invited to Davos, and run depts at Ivy League schools.

Behind closed doors these are the conversations I’ve been privy too. How to captivate the “market” which is a euphemism created years ago to replace the religious concept of “flock”.

Mirror neurons really challenge the correctness of any wisdom to come from business leaders. It’s a pantomime, ingratiate ourselves before the socially rich

People see taxation as theft of property. I see it as reminding people there are no Gods or kings.

I don't know about mirror neurons personally, but the cult-like behaviour, evangelism, and buzz words in business has been easily observable for decades.

Now you go into subreddits like /r/superstonk, bitcoin, GME, Dogecoin, etc. And the cultish religiosity is palpable in these echo chambers too.

So I'm not really surprised by this, if what you've shared is true.

Marketing matters a lot, and NKLA was quite popular or even infamous there. A known brand does have value, even according to 'real economics'.

Most investors seem to have been valuing that aspect and completely discounting the engineering/tech.

It helps me to think in terms of particles and waves.

A person is a particle and their influence is a wave.

I’m not so sure light is both, but our cognition enables seeing it as both.

Mirror neurons fire when we engage a behavior or see it performed.

Our culture is built upon a meme repeating protectionist like chants for the rich, deflation for the middle class, and stagnation of the poor.

Repeat, fire mirror neurons.

It’s not perfect mind control though cause once you know how the sausage is made, why give that particle (rich person) reverence?

People choose to exchange money for goods and services that improve their life. Rich people generally became rich by directly or indirectly providing goods and services that improved the lives of a great many people.

Rich people generally became rich by inheriting lots of money.

https://ips-dc.org/the_self-made_hallucination_of_americas_r...

Providing for one's children can be a powerful motivator. How long does that generational wealth last on avg?

I don't have it at hand, but in finding that other page I came across something saying, I think, 3-5 generations. It's googlable.

That seems somewhat reasonable. Work hard, do exceptionally well, and you can benefit your grandchildren but not very far beyond that.

I'm usually a very negative person but another side of the coin here is that if you were good at this "speculative generation of statics to captivate" the best way to raise money was "gaming" big capital. With the risk profile of retail investors changing and more risky ways to trade on public markets becoming accepted comes a positive aspect of the naturalization of highly speculative single picks on the stock market, it's easier for more people to raise a lot of money for risky endeavors.

If it's going to be good or bad for society I don't know.

I personally have most of my money on low risk stuff, and when volatility spikes I sometimes sell options in the morning before starting my day.

The problem is that one of the incentives to do hard things under capitalism is wealth, and if things get too scammy you can get wealthy without actually building the thing. So while it is remarkably easy to raise capital right now, you also need a set of people who have clear positive intentions and want to build things raising that money.

It sounds like your cult is Theta Gang then! Seriously though that seems to be what the quiet crowd is doing - taking advantage of the premiums caused by the general crazy that permeates the market. I don’t know enough to sell options but I keep meaning to read up.

When your RSU and ESPP vest, open your brokerage and try selling a single 20-30% out of the money call that expires in a month.

You can read about it, but actually doing it is not that hard. Although, given the inflated stock prices and US equity options being 100 sized lot - you do have to keep an eye to roll it out if market is getting really exuberant.

Warning that a lot of companies have a trading policy that forbids employees from investing in options or any kind of derivative on their own stock. You might be allowed to make options trades on other companies in the sector (not legal advice).

I've only ever heard of this in the financial sector (even then, they can create trading plans for trades in future).

But yeah sure, I am not a lawyer or a fiduciary and this is not legal or fiduciary financial advise.

My last few big tech employers have had a policy forbidding me from trading in options or derivatives on the stock, as a lowly software engineer.

Care to share? From my knowledge, Google and Microsoft have no such restrictions.

You are forbidden to trade derivatives of GOOG as an employee of Alphabet. Source is that I am one and I have read my insider trading policy.

Granted the internal policy might be more detailed but I've read https://abc.xyz/investor/other/google-code-of-conduct/

It talks about not allowing "hedging Google stock".

To me it means "you can't short Google stock", which is reasonable. It would be really fishy for an employee to bet on failure of the company he works for.

It doesn't mean "you can't buy call options on Google stock", which would be unreasonable.

Here’s the quote from the document you linked:

> You should familiarize yourself with Google’s Insider Trading Policy. It describes company-wide policies that address the risks of insider trading, such as a prohibition on any Google employee hedging Google stock; and periodic blackout windows when no Google employee may trade Google stock.

The quotes gives hedging as an example of prohibited conduct and recommends reading the internal policy. The parent comment is from someone who read the internal policy. What more do you want, the internal policy to be leaked in full?

Employees of tech companies with a somewhat open culture can often make inferences about the company’s performance before financials are released. The SEC investigates when people make suspicious gains from options trades. Companies don’t want that kind of attention. Rather than try to define the exact parameters of what kind of trade is risky, it’s easier to just ban them as a rule. This may seem unreasonable to some, but it appears to be a common practice.

Check out TastyTrade for a plethora of free education on options in general, but especially selling options.

> it's easier for more people to raise a lot of money for risky endeavors.

Is it easier to raise money for risky endeavors or for "hot" endeavors. I'm not sure this no structure to how a lot of people are now allocating capital is actually contributing anything positive, just pure malinvestment.

AMC is a perfect example. It's a company that raised hundreds of millions at valuations 10x of what it had months ago. Is AMC a "risky investment" we should be allocating capital too? Box office receipts and still down 50% and may never fully recover. Why is AMC a good use of that capital rather than institutions that can replace it completely?

You're mostly right but I don't see anything going on in the markets today as much different than how it has fundamentally operated over the past century or so.

Hell, much of the same "speculative gamesmanship" was going on in the tech bubble of the late 90s. Just completely irrational valuations detached from reality. We ended up in a big correction.

As Benjamin Graham said several decades ago and Warren Buffett Repeats constantly "over the short-term the market is a voting machine, over the long-term it's a weighing machine"

What is the time reference for "anymore"?

Was the 1920's stock bubble and 1929 crash just following fundamentals the whole time?

Anymore? Keynes said this in 1936.

Yeah it is all bullshit all the time these days. Spoken as an "elightened" but not Illuminated one. This is not a left vs. right issue. It is a 99.9% vs 0.1% issue. Sadly most of the 99.9% actually deserve what's coming in the future struggle for resources because they would rather accept what is fed to them and be led like lambs to where ever than actually think critically about the world. Most of those that "get it" are not interested in helping the masses and the masses don't want to be helped anyway. Next couple decades may be interesting times.

Still a $5b company: https://www.google.com/finance/quote/NKLA:NASDAQ

Which is surprising....do they even have a car in the works?

A friend just bought 2000$ in shares, because "its cheap right now".

The only thing the stock price reflects is how valuable the stock is. Nothing more, nothing less.

If each person of earth decided that their life goal was to own 100 nikola shares "to feel alive" or "own a piece of their failure" or whatever, their stock price would skyrocket, and stay high as long as everybody holds.

Those who value stock in terms of a company fundamentals, are making the assumption that at least most other participants in the market will value the stock in terms of its fundamentals as well.

That assumption might be true for some stocks. It isn't true for stocks that "people ""just"" like" (or dislike) and are willing to pay a premium to buy, because it has some other value to them.

>or dislike

The disliked ones tend to get valued kind of fairly as even if you hate them they pay dividends or similar.

At 5 min and 57 sec... https://youtu.be/AJUIaVuqpUs?t=357

Is this whole shebang very different from Tesla FSD claims?

Very different. Nikola showed a vehicle that absolutely could not do the incredibly basic thing it was shown doing.

Tesla has provided FSD beta access to two thousand real people who are showing the system's capability, warts and all, to anyone who cares to watch on YouTube or elsewhere.

I'm glad to see a little accountability happening, but we've been building up to this for a long time as standards have loosened and money flooded in.

One startup I happened to follow was uBeam; their former VP of engineering had a great blog called Lies, Damn Lies, and Startup PR that tracked what was going on there. Whether or not it was legally fraud is a matter of debate, but it was certainly dodgy: https://liesandstartuppr.blogspot.com/search/label/ubeam

I'd be curious to hear about other startups folks here think were somewhere near the borderline of fraud. There must be a lot of stories out there!

If you haven't seen the Hindenburg report, I recommend reading it for the comedic value: https://hindenburgresearch.com/nikola/

Notable laughs:

* Nikola rolled their semi truck down a hill to show that it worked

* Trevor appointed his brother Travis "Director of Hydrogen Production/Infrastructure" when his only experience was pouring concrete driveways

* The infamous "HTML5 supercomputer" comment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPL-PbDUKrM

This company was an obvious scam from the beginning...the EV hype brought on by Tesla swept up so many naive people. Some of my family invested in this stock and lost a lot of money.

It looks like share price was ~10$ at the start (2018 to 2020) and is currently ~13$ so presumable your family could cash out right now for a 30% profit.

$10 was the SPAC before they merged to become NKLA. The merger was announced in March 2020 (when the price jumped to low teens) and completed in June (when the hype made it go up to $60s).

I invested too, doesn’t mean it was necessarily a bad investment. You gotta take risks if you want to get in early on potential huge gains. Luckily I didn’t put too much in. Let that be a lesson to anyone, don’t invest into speculative companies unless you’re willing to lose it all.

don't conflate investment and speculation

It’s all the same. Investment firms all the time throwing money at speculation. It’s all about what your risk tolerance is.

The company name alone should have been a hint that they were building on Tesla's hype.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikola_Tesla

Exactly. First rule is making a fraud is to associate it with something credible.

I think that's very much a hindsight kind of thing. I mean, yes, Nikola was a scam. But in "the beginning" the only people willing to say that it was a scam were ones who sounded exactly like the much louder, better funded, and media-accessible people screaming that Tesla was a scam. This very site was filled with $TSLAQ nonsense. And it was all wrong, much of it deliberately so.

The investment world is drowning in deliberate misinformation. There's no path for reasoned criticism to break through. Pick any stock and there's someone willing to tell you it's a scam. Or a gem.

Edit: and this subthread is a perfect, shining example. Just look at all the people jumping in to perpetuate and argument that somehow Tesla is, I guess, comparably fraudulent to Nikola, a company that got caught faking a vehicle that didn't exist. No one trusts you people, because you sound the same for everything.

In all fairness there was a non-zero chance of Tesla running out of money at one point. At the final word on Tesla being worth what it is hasn't been spoken neither. I do have to give Musk credit for being able to maintain Tesla the way he does, under everyone else the company wouldn't exist anymore. Not that I think Tesla is particularly well run so, but Elon's ability to entertain the market and keep money flowing is impressive.

The ability to run pump and dumps in crypto with impunity definitely helps.

No it doesn't. Stop claiming this nonsense. It is totally irrelevant for Tesla financials.

Tesla's Q1 operating profit of $594M was slightly less than the sum of their $101M Bitcoin profit and the $518M regulatory credits they received.

My goodness, the regulatory credits meme once again. How are those short shorts feeling by the way?

Ah, yes, the meme that is Tesla's own quarterly financial report.

Funny how people like you are so desperate, at this point you literally can't even use the current quarterly report anymore and must talk about the last one. And then string together a bunch of revenue that you can then somehow argue 'doesn't count' for #reasons.

Who cares about unit margin or operational margin, as long as you can pick a bunch of revenue items and by removing them they didn't make any profit.

And even if your argument was true and they didn't make #realprofit, who would even care as long as they keep having their current growth trend at the unit margin they have.

The meme that the number somehow matters at all while completely ignoring the massive growth

And in Q2 the lost $24M on Bitcoin. They got $300somethingM in credits. So what? Who the fuck cares.

And the regulatory credit thing is so fucking played out that people who still bring it up can only be described as haters.

Are you seriously unable to look at a long term trend? Can you seriously not see how Bitcoin is totally irrelevant in their long term story?

While it is true that Tesla might have gone bankrupt. There is a big difference between 'this is a risk company with growth potential, be careful' and 'this company is fraud'.

Many TSLAQ people were far more extreme then saying 'they could go bankrupt, car industry is risky.

> Not that I think Tesla is particularly well run so, but Elon's ability to entertain the market and keep money flowing is impressive.

The haven't really need to raise that much money in a long time. They did some raises in the last couple years but that money is mostly in the cash balance now.

Its not like they are just raising more cash all the time.

Hey, you’re not going to like hearing this, and feel free to ignore, but $TSLA is c. 20% below it’s peak valuation and still is trading at 100x earnings on pretty mediocre growth.

It’s still wildly overvalued, people don’t talk about it as much though since the price is flat, not up. Be careful of confirmation bias.

I think you just proved his point. NKLA was an outright scam, and Tesla wasn’t, but the way many people talked about Tesla was as if it was a scam selling vapor ware. It took a very keen eye indeed to tease out fact from fiction. Tesla may have “mediocre growth” as you claim (I strongly disagree) but the number of Tesla cars I see on the road are a testament that the company is no scam.

Interested how you define 'scam'. Would you say Wirecard was a scam (their payments network is still in use today), or Enron?

My point is that the fact a company is producing a product does not necessarily disqualify them from being a 'scam'.

A scam can't be defined by the mere legal definition of fraud. A true scam is all about the feeling of people on the internet.

Somehow people always forget that.

Not sure I'd classify 100% year-on-year growth to revenues of $12 billion as mediocre, during a year when the production lines of two of their three cars were shut down for almost an entire quarter and we also went through the worst pandemic since 1918.

The valuation is still steep by earnings and compared to likely competitors, but it's not based on speculation devoid of observations.

Tesla also reopened their Freemont plant within days against health department orders saying they were producing ventilators and then delivering expired bipap machines bought in bulk while really working on luxury cars. The pandemic didn't slow them much because they just violated the orders.

Tesla wasn't faking videos by rolling a nonfunctional truck down a hill. They're shipping almost a million cars a year now (looks to be like 850k in 2021 I think). Mine took me to Yellowstone a few weeks back.

Now, sure, "overvalued" is a very reasonable argument. I'd even agree.

That's not the kind of rhetoric that was deployed against the company and you know it. Which is why people didn't believe folks screaming that Nikola was a scam.

They had a video on their website for years (taken down very recently, I believe) that showed a FSD "self-driving" Tesla with the narrator saying something like "the driver is only present for legal reasons".

And again, people see arguments like this attempting to liken Tesla to a clearly fraudulent scam (the truck didn't even go!), and is it any wonder they threw up their hands and figured NKLA was a good bet?

Look, nitpick about FSD if you like (I bought it, FWIW -- 100% happy customer). But don't claim it's the same as faking a motor in a truck that didn't have one.

Well but Tesla is still calling their drive assist autopilot and Musk has at multiple times in the past said full independent driving is just around the corner and all these "around the corner" dates have past and there still is not fully independent autopilot.

So yes there is a difference in scale, but not in principle I would say. Musk is also lying (I don't believe that by now he still believes we will have unassisted autopilot next year) to keep the stock price high.

So, full autonomous is... very hard. It is easy to get most of the way there, and then think you're nearly ready to ship a product.

Staying on the road, obeying traffic laws, not hitting other cars, this is just the beginning. There are so many oddball situations you see when driving that an autonomous system also has to handle.

One of the big ones is construction, and that alone brings a whole host of issues including wacky lane changes, following the direction of human workers, missing or misleading lane markings, debris, and more.

What is wrong with calling it AutoPilot? What does AutoPilot do in a plane ?? it keeps speed, direction and altitude. It doesn't do anything magical, it doesn't replace an actual Pilot and fully navigate the plane from Gate to Gate and hit on the stewardesses as well.

Telsa has always separated AutoPilot and Full Self Driving as separate features. "But people confuse AutoPilot and think is does everything and is a virtual chauffeur", Well those people are stupid, stupid like the people who try to trick the car into driving and fake out the driver attention safety features.

Right, these are very different things. I am very bearish on Tesla, but they are shipping cars!

After reading about quality issues for years and years about Teslas, I'm not rushing to buy one any time soon. Though I know many owners really love their cars. I see more than a few every commute to work.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/03/musk-tesla-was-about-a-month...

Tesla almost went bankrupt. They started shutting stores that were tied into commercial leases that hadn't expired and all kinds of stuff. At one point they said they would never need to capital raise again and then did one 3 days later or something. They made wild statements of autonomous taxis by the end of 2020 in a desperate bid to build hype before the capital raise.

They survived and raised a lot of capital from shareholders and now seem in no danger of bankruptcy, but it was either a real threat or the CEO is lying about it to be theatrical.

Best time to raise capital is when you don’t need it

You can't make a claim like:

>And it was all wrong, much of it deliberately so.

then act like people calling you out for that are calling Tesla a scam. It's a real company, they make cars, but the short sellers weren't and aren't crackpots from a 'Tesla is overvalued' perspective.

It's great to unveil such 'scams' and have investigations like this for everyone to see. I'm glad I shorted them before all of this. So we'll see what happens next.

Now the next great scam we all want answers for and we need to talk about is that misleading contraption called FSD.

> when his only experience was pouring concrete driveways

In NL we call this 'has affinity with the core business'.

"Has paved paths and laid foundations for the automobile industry"

Are you in PR? :-)

I think paved ways is canonical ( not a native speaker though ).

“Paved the way” is the common expression.

Wow, thanks for sharing, I’d never seen this before:

> "The entire infotainment system is a HTML 5 super computer," Milton said. "That's the standard language for computer programmers around the world, so using it let's us build our own chips. And HTML 5 is very secure. Every component is linked on the data network, all speaking the same language. It's not a bunch of separate systems that somehow still manage to communicate."

The founder of an apparently very technically challenging company speaking like that should have been an instant red flag, that’s absolute nonsense.

It’s not even so much his poor understanding of the underlying infotainment tech. I wouldn’t expect him to know the architecture. A good CEO would be fine delegating that.

What speaks volumes is that he clearly has no idea what he’s talking about but speaks as if he’s a domain authority. Of course, this is a classic trait of a megalomaniac fraudster.

But speaking like that moves people, I am trying to learn

Its like when you choose Intelligence 0 in Fallout, everyone that is smart sounds dumb and everyone dumb sounds normal

Predicting how to relate to people to make an investment is something some of these sales guys get that I don’t

I can persuade people to do a lot of things, but selling equity to a bunch of technophobic old money and English as a Second Language people? Learning

Scammers sometimes intentionally dumb down their language to filter out discerning people from their audience. That way they only remain with a non-technical audience who are charmed with the scammer's presence.

Entertaining video on the downfall of Nikola https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1oqqnkkTKVM

This is hilarious. Very creative. Thanks for sharing.

Nikola is one of Crystal lang largest sponsors[0]. I wonder if this is going to have repercussions. It's no fault of the Crystal community but might cast a shadow nevertheless.

[0] https://crystal-lang.org/sponsors/

Using fraud to support interesting open source work – I'm kinda conflicted.

So long as Crystal was never influenced by Nikola, I see no conflict from Crystal's perspective. Money is money. It's only tainted by the morality of its origins if you let it.

Oddly common. Many of the crypto ponzies that lead nowhere contributed a lot to some good open source projects. Well their employees did at least

I see Mozilla always complaining about privacy matters and violations of its largest partner, critiquing the very hand that feeds them and they still take in the money that keeps them alive and accounts for 80% of their entire revenues YoY.

That partner is Google, the anti-privacy company that stands against what Mozilla is fighting for and supporting (and also funds many other open-source projects). Nothing has happened or changed and zero repercussions for Google's actions. The same for Crystal.

I do not think you will find any clean hands in the tech industry and everyone knows it.

80% of their revenues, but probably 200-300% percent of their profits. Google just hands them an enormous amount of money, regularly, for nothing but a token in return, and everything else they do fails.

Hindenburg Research was right then.

https://hindenburgresearch.com/nikola/

They stake a lot of money on being right.

"2018: In Order to Continue the Appearance of Progress, Nikola Posted a YouTube Video of Its Nikola One “In Motion” on the Road. Text Messages from a Former Employee Reveal the Truck Was Simply Filmed Rolling Down a Big Hill."

Also see their research on Lordstown Motors. They seem to have discovered a major fraud niche in upstart EV makers.

tangent:

For Hindenburg Research's business model, it doesn't suffice for them to accurately detect that a company is fraud. Hindenburg also needs to get the timing of their trades right, and find a way to communicate the message that results in market demand for the stock dropping.

e.g. the kind of horror story where you enter into a short position on a stock that you believe is a fraud or otherwise wildly overvalued by the market (and you're right) and the market price climbs 10x over two years, so you exit to take a huge loss, then maybe 1-3 years later the market catches up and decides the company is a failure. You were "right", but so what?

Maybe another way to look at this is that there are probably a lot of other frauds or other overvalued companies out there, but the current market conditions don't make them viable targets for short sellers, so maybe no one is going to try very hard to out them.

The fact that the hedge fun researching this Hydrogen powered company is named "Hindenburg" is hilarious.

nikola's demonstration truck prototype was "powered" by gravitational potential energy, not by hydrogen.

Original title Grand jury indicts Trevor Milton, founder of electric carmaker Nikola, on three counts of fraud

Suggested title which does fit : Grand jury indicts Trevor Milton, founder of Nikola, on three counts of fraud

I wondered why there is a superfluous comma in the title.

There isn't a superfluous comma, the two commas are use to delineate the relative clause "founder of electric carmaker Nikola".

There was a superfluous comma.

I could be mistaken, but I think it was a tongue-in-cheek reference to Nikola being a fraud all along. That is, Milton, the founder of the Nikola fraud.

Grand jury indicts Trevor Milton, founder of Nikola fraud

Interesting how even after this was announced, their market cap is over $5b (https://www.google.com/finance/quote/NKLA:NASDAQ) in the same ballpark as established car companies like Mazda (https://www.google.com/finance/quote/MZDAF:OTCMKTS)

What? How?

Is there any potential upside at all, unless it's another pump and dump or short squeeze game?

I also think it’s overvalued, but the company distanced itself from the criminal founder long ago.

The company also has about 3/4 of a billion dollars in the bank. It’s basically an extremely well funded startup with a bit of a head start on the EV market at this point.

With the number of companies (from Tesla to Chevrolet) with large volumes actual EVs sold and on the road, I don't see how Nikola has a head start?

Popular opinion around EV tech is approaching PowerPC-era Mac apologists.

"Yes, it's less performant, but it has {insert special, unmeasurable and/or unproven magic here}."

(Oh, this is fun! I haven't done this in a looooong time!)

Unmeasurable? Like, you would have had to run an actual editing, encoding, rendering, or simulation task to measure it, but you only had the skills to read how many GHz were on the box, so you personally were unable to measure it? I suppose I'd have to hand you that one.

How well did the "clock speed is all that matters" rhetoric age over the last decade? When was the last time that Intel's claimed perf boost wasn't IPC driven?

My favorite part of this story is fifteen years later, when Intel's CEO says:

    We have to deliver better products to the PC ecosystem than
    any possible thing that a lifestyle company
    in Cupertino makes

LOOOOOOOL! Whipped at CPU design (and manufacture -- who pays for those new kingmaking TSMC nodes?) by a company that doesn't even specialize in it. Whipped so badly that they have to admit it, even to themselves. Ouch!

That's not really a good analogy. Every interesting technology has its share of unhinged fanpeople. And it's not interesting to judge a technology by the behaviour of its fans.

There's only one real Achilles heel of EV tech and it's a big one—the limited supply (and the consequent high price) of batteries. If there was an unlimited supply of battery cells at a low price, EVs would be generally superior to comparable ICE vehicles in core objective metrics.

There are numerous secondary limitations of EVs, such as the availability of charging facilities where they are needed. But this class of problem is directly aligned with uptake. They solve themselves as more EVs are adopted and market share increases.

Nikola is probably at the same stage - if not ahead - of Tesla when it comes to trucks.

How much would a Tesla with only prototype Semis and a factory under construction be valued at? About $5 BB actually sounds quite right, maybe even undervalued depending on cultist zealotry and SEC enforcement levels.

Has Nikola prototypes that can actually drive by now? From a quick look, there seems to be suspiciously little mention of that, despite there being a clear motivation for them to widely promote that after the video scandal broke last year?

Ford is the obvious leader for electric trucks, what does Nikola have that For doesn't?

> Nikola is probably at the same stage - if not ahead - of Tesla when it comes to trucks.

See, this level of misinformation is a big reason the company even exists yet.

Tesla has been selling EVs for years now, and has prototyped their own trucks based on their own existing drivetrain, battery pack IP, software.

What Nikola has, when we remove the fraudulent claims, is a prototype built by Iveco, with zero substantial IP from Nikola.

To say Nikola is at the same stage of Tesla is not even wrong. They've never built a working truck in their entire existence. Their "stage" is at a super position from nothing to infinity, as long as you don't look, and no one has ever been allowed to look, at the risk of getting a dead cat.

There is no way this is true. Tesla has functional factories for batteries for one.

Nikola has focused on some substantially different segments of the EV market than they have. Nikola has focused on the trucking market, rather than the consumer car market, which at least is different from many of its competitors

Trucking you can still kill people. You know who I'd like to hear about? The company making self-loading and unloading shipping containers. Now that, I bet, is an achievable goal.

> I also think it’s overvalued, but the company distanced itself from the criminal founder long ago.

September 2020 is not long ago in terms of distancing yourself from the foundations of an enormous fraud.

Given this market, the fact that it’s wholly fraudulent is incredibly bullish

Yeah actually deliving a product that sells is such legacy thinking...we badly need a hard crash to clear out the deadwood and hucksters in the economy.

I think relying on the market itself to do this is a terrible mistake.

The unsustainable economy we are in currently is less a function of market failure and more a function of excessive government interference, globalisation and technological plateauing. In a race to the bottom everybody loses. The industrial revolution took place in the context of cheap energy, new science and engineering, expensive labor and higher interest rates. Since perhaps the 1970s-1990s all these trends have been reversing.

Well... remember the hertz saga?

Hertz got out of bankruptcy because they have a (somewhat) profitable business model and a lot of assets they sold off.

I don't think that applies here - at least not without massive growth that seems outside the realm of possibility.

If I remember the analysis of Matt Levine correctly, they have a lot cars, and even if the beginning of Covid was rough on them as ppl traveled less, the price of 2nd hand cars went up 6 months after the that and they were able to bounce back.

I am more surprised that Mazda's market cap is only $5B. That's just about the same as Duolingo. Interesting times we live in, really.

Traditional car stocks are at bargain() prices now.

() some may read that as sane, or trading according to fundamentals.

Only if your hypothesis is that companies like Mazda won't wither in the inevitable electric car disruption.

My guess is fossil fuel cars will remain competitive with electric cars (cost per mile wise), since the more demand for fossil fuels drop, the cheaper it gets to operate fossil fuel cars.

It really depends when the governments actually start banning fossil fuel cars. Or implements higher fossil fuel taxes, but I do not see a chance of that. And I do not see bans for new fossil fuel cars actually going into effect for at least 15 to 20 years.

At some point gas stations won’t make as much money and thus will start changing to electric. The supply could flip with current electric charging stations which will move the needle.

We’ll also see what gets manufactured… there might be a time where few gas options will exist.

I do not see that point being in near future. All the infrastructure for fossil fuel delivery is already installed and can easily last decades. It will be a slow shift as more and more gas stations shift more of their space to electric charging. Or maybe they get obviated altogether since you can charge anywhere, but not in next 10 or even 20 years.

Diesel is still diesel when it comes to power too, and I have not heard of any electric alternative that can compare. I expect that to stick around even longer.

Most gas stations will not change to charging station. Instead, every parking place will eventually have its own charging outlet.

Most gas station in the Oslo area in Norway have fast chargers.

The point is that when every parking spot is a fast charger, why bother with the gas station model?

Even in our way to get there, it makes more sense to put the charging at the origin or destination, except for long trips.

Every parking spot may be a charger, but not a fast charger. That would be way too much expensive, just in cabling for example.

Brand new fuel cars may be forbidden in many parts of the world.

I don't think this will ever happen in China or the US and if it happens on Europe we are more than 10 years away from that. I think the latter because there's no way European governments will ban long range cars that don't rely on a single vendor for the charging station network.

The problem is that the infrastructure of ICE and oil massively profits from scale, as this drops many of these assets will turn negative.

Even if per mile the car would be competitive, the lost of value of the car itself would be incredibly.

Who will still buy an ICE car in 2030.

And that is before the new regulation that potentially makes these cars even less wanted.

This was my point. Gasoline will be banned for new cars at some point.

I would bet everything I own that gasoline for consumers cars (especially the pickup trucks so many love) is not going anywhere in the US by 2030. 2040 maybe, 2050 likelier.

Seems like a pretty plausible hypothesis: Current car manufacturers already have car factories, they only need to put in electric motors in stead of combustion engines. New electric-car manufacturers need not only to put in electric motors, but build the rest of the car -- i.e. the facilities to build the rest of the car -- too.

If you want some market crash hedges they are perfect.

Car companies are treated as government institutions. BMW and Volkswagen used to produce tanks. The German government will ask them too again if they start struggling to much. Companies like Fiat or Ferrari are as big a part of Italian national pride as rooting for their football team. Hyundai is 10% of South Korea's entire economy.

The car industry is political. Anyone assuming one company is going to sweep in and own everything hasn't paid attention. These companies will be defended until the ends of the earth by their own governments, so you have a massive put existing for all of them by default.

When did BMW and Volkswagen produce tanks; which ones?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_K%C3%BCbelwagen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_Schwimmwagen https://www.warhistoryonline.com/war-articles/bmws-dark-hist...

Sorry, apparently I interpreted "tanks" more literally than you do. The Kübelwagen and its amphibic Schwimmwagen variant were el cheapo jeeps, not tanks; BMW manufactured mainly aeroplane engines. Those "vehicles that they needed to wage war from the Urals to Morocco" mentioned in your third article were in all probability "staff cars", for superior officers, based on (barely modified?) pre-war standard civilian models.

So no tanks, AFAICT. They had enough other companies for that.

One company has endless growth potential, 80% gross margins, and every new customer served has marginal cost implications to the business.

The other one does not.

I think you can guess which one is which.

For the record - I'm just as skeptical as many others are about tech valuations, but there is a legitimate reason to value companies they way we do, it's just not always a "its tech, so it has to be valued at BLAH", there's a lot of nuance to these businesses.

One company has also lied about "nearly all aspects of the business," so maybe its 5B valuation is based on not quite legitimate things.

I assume this is a comparison to duolingo, not Nikola.

One company has endless growth potential, 80% gross margins, and every new customer served has marginal cost implications to the business.

Mazda?

Because according to their SEC filings Duolingo has pretty limited growth potential, increasing losses (or in other words, negative gross margins), and they spend a significant amount of money to attract each new paying customer. They only approach 80% gross margins if you use fantasy unicorn accounting instead of GAAP.

Are you trolling?

> Because according to their SEC filings Duolingo has pretty limited growth potential,

    The global market for direct-to-consumer language learning is large, growing, and shifting online. According to HolonIQ, total consumer spend on both online and offline language learning represented a $61 billion market in 2019, and will grow to $115 billion in 2025, implying a CAGR of 11% over this period. Online language learning is the fastest-growing market segment, projected to grow from $12 billion in 2019 to $47 billion in 2025, representing a CAGR of approximately 26% over this period, and to comprise 41% of total consumer spend on language learning in 2025. We believe that growth in digital spend will be driven in part by a shift away from offline offerings, as consumers seek more affordable, convenient, and higher quality online solutions.[0]

> increasing losses (or in other words, negative gross margins)

That's not how losses and negative gross margins work. I just double checked, gross profit for DuoLingo in 2020 was 71.55% (sorry not 80%). Compare that to Mazda's abysmal 21.7%. Cars specifically require heavy R&D (which does not go into COGS), so the comparison is a nice one since R&D for DuoLingo also requires heavy R&D.

> spend a significant amount of money to attract each new paying customer

Customers who pay subscriptions, not a one-time car cost. Every new car created requires upfront capital to build the car. SaaS CLV vs a car CLV requires WAY less costly touch-points after the initial sell.[1]

[0] - https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1562088/000162828021...

[1] - https://a16z.com/2014/05/13/understanding-saas-valuation-pri...

I stand by my comments. Groupon and LivingSocial said the same about their respective market, a decade ago. And if you'd done your research into HolonIQ's report, offline language learning was the supermajority of the $61 billion market. Online learning was a tiny tiny fraction of the market, and as many other commenters have pointed out: Duolingo and most of its online competitors are only good for superficial, introductory-level learning, with actual skill growth requiring in-person interaction. Moreover, Duolingo's online competition alone includes hundreds of free and paid apps and websites, plus Youtube and Twitch.

Duolingo's "gross profit" is not calculated using GAAP. It's calculated using fantasy unicorn accounting. Key giveaway: if a company's revenue "more than doubles" but it's losses also more than double, it's not actually profitable on a per-unit basis; it's simply shifting items that should be reported in COGS to other items that let it artificially inflate its gross margins. In Duolingo's case, it's actually worse: while revenues doubles, losses are on track to quadruple (they reported a $13.5 million loss for just 2021Q1, compared to roughly $16 million for all of 2020).

I've worked for enough startups going public that I can spot when a startup is playing games with its financials. Duolingo is one of them. This time next year, Duolingo will be looked on as 2021's Groupon.

> Groupon and LivingSocial said the same about their respective market, a decade ago.

These are hilarious businesses to cherry pick because they explicitly used fuzzy accounting for the nature of their industry - which was selling coupons that may or may not be used. Their numbers were irregular because they accounted for coupons that may have never been actually used, but were allocated on their books as such. DuoLingo is NOTHING like that. People pay a subscription for a service that uses software as its delivery mechanism. COGS is simple for them -> hosting + customer service. COGS is very different for Groupon and LivingSocial.

> Key giveaway: if a company's revenue "more than doubles" but it's losses also more than double, it's not actually profitable on a per-unit basis; it's simply shifting items that should be reported in COGS to other items that let it artificially inflate its gross margins.

You have no idea what you're talking about and clearly have never actually seen financials of a business like DuoLingo.

Guess when NetSuite's most profitable year was? That's right, 2009, during one of the biggest recessions in the world's history, and it's because they fired their growth engine (S&M) and just pumped out cash.

https://a16z.com/2015/05/15/a16z-podcast-why-saas-revenue-is...

You have no idea what you're talking about and clearly have never actually seen financials of a business like DuoLingo.

:) My list of clients when I was still working at a firm include many tech companies ranging in size from vastly unprofitable startups to multi-billion dollar public companies, in industries including robotics, hardware, SaaS, PaaS/IaaS, biotech, media tech, aviation, and clean tech.

A number of YC startups were clients, including some that are still actively discussed on these forums today. At least one of the Groupon, LivingSocial, etc., cohort was a client...

DuoLingo is NOTHING like that. People pay a subscription for a service that uses software as its delivery mechanism. COGS is simple for them -> hosting + customer service. COGS is very different for Groupon and LivingSocial.

DuoLingo's hosting costs should be low. But content development costs should be included in COGS (being pedantic: COGS doesn't apply to non-inventory business activities, so we should be using the term COR instead). Content development and customer service aren't cheap.

And of course, gross margins are irrelevant if you're constantly blowing past your revenue numbers by overspending on "product development" (i.e., the tech side). History is littered with companies who claimed to have great "gross margins" but died because they overspent on "product development."

> History is littered with companies who claimed to have great "gross margins" but died because they overspent on "product development."

Please do tell.

> DuoLingo's hosting costs should be low. But content development costs should be included in COGS (being pedantic: COGS doesn't apply to non-inventory business activities, so we should be using the term COR instead). Content development and customer service aren't cheap.

I agree with you here, except for specifics. Do we know how much content costs? (ps, once you create content for a language it can scale infinitely - as opposed to having teachers in a classroom who can't). We don't know how much customer service costs / personnel they have, BUT it is part of COGS (as per their definition) so its impossible to qualify that hosting "should be lower" unless you know their specific hosting costs.

And there are other competitors who can copy whatever they are doing. I agree Mazda provides more value.

You know whats great about our market. If you truly believe this, you can make a duolingo copy and therefor have your own $5B company (sounds nice huh?) AND you can invest whatever assets you might have into Mazda and make money on the value of their stock.

And yet NKLA still has a $5B market cap despite the entire company being 100% fraud. Amazing.

[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/nkla

Came here to say this. So many good companies doing real work worth way less. Pure insanity.

They have ~$900mm cash. So it’s only $80% bullshit, for whatever that’s worth.

Well they cheated so much money in and now they are on live suppor. But since they don't have much expenses they can survive for a long run on that money.

It has a $5B market cap, and I was not able to confirm that the organization has every produced a working product. A cursory look at Wikipedia for the guy and the company would indicate it is a scam. Not to mention naming the company to be off brand, but related to a real company.

The only source of his wealth might be Worthington Industries, but his track record indicates he has no expertise in making or managing anything, so is he related to someone high up there or something?

Well if a Deli can be worth 100 million...

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/15/theres-a-single-new-jersey-d...

Maybe all these valuations are correct and its the dollar that is going the direction of the zimbabwean dollar ? https://s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/P1-BA632_ZIMDLR_DV...

Apples and oranges. NKLA has a daily volume of 11M shares. I’m not saying there isn’t shenanigans involved, but it’s much harder to do at that scale v.s. a handful of thinly traded OTC shares.

That deli isn't "worth" $100 million: it's thinly traded on an underregulated market (OTC). The headline is eye popping and drives readers; the more mundane reality is that the deli's 60-or-so shareholders can stake whatever prices they want between each other without ever realizing an actual valuation of anywhere near $100 million.

This is in contrast to Nikola, which is currently listed on Nasdaq and appears to have gone out of its way to deceive retail investors.

This is exactly how startup valuations work though. Some minor chunk of equity gets bought up by an investor, so by extension the entire equity of the company is now worth billions on a per-share basis.

> Some minor chunk of equity gets bought up by an investor, so by extension the entire equity of the company is now worth billions on a per-share basis.

This prospective valuation is based on the assumption that the company eventually either goes public on a reputable, retail exchange or is bought for some reasonable fraction of the expected share price. Neither of these is or would be true for the deli.

But I think your overarching point is an excellent one, and it's exactly why I'm skeptical of the valuations implied by fractional VC investments. Especially when they're tied to the Uber model.

Deli was being turned into an acquisition vehicle to take a foreign company public. It’s a common way for a foreign company to access the US capital markets.

Older I get, more I realize the market is just a game of human psychology. Stocks, housing, crypto, etc. History says speculative 'investing' ends poorly but this time, who knows? If you happen to have the answer, I'm all ears.

"The father of value investing, Benjamin Graham, explained this concept by saying that in the short run, the market is like a voting machine--tallying up which firms are popular and unpopular. But in the long run, the market is like a weighing machine--assessing the substance of a company."

Boring answer, but in the long-term, great businesses go up, whereas crappy businesses go bankrupt.

They used to. In the era of quantitative easing, governments just pump money into any failing major player.

edit: I see I rustled some jimmies. Feel free to have a look yourself at "modern capitalism".

https://money.cnn.com/news/specials/storysupplement/bankbail...

Pumping money into the market in general has the same effect.

Especially if chosen inflation measures conveniently exclude capital areas money would accumulate (stocks & property).

Yes, agreed.

I think this was much more true in the long ago era of regulation, (mostly) autarky, and limited market info/trading barriers.

I've looked at "Security Analysis" and it's very much a historical piece - railroads and (practically) buggy whips. Things change relatively faster these days. Yesterday, Kodak was the bluest of chips; today, pretty much a joke. Heck, look at Buffett in the last decade - I'll bet he fully Grahamitized IBM, which didn't make it any less hollow. That sort of analysis, or even certainty (a false premise by definition) just isn't worth the effort for the average ownership span.

In times of plenty, where money flows and pools drives stock prices.

In times of poverty, fundamentals drive stock prices.

We've been in a time of plenty for a historically abnormally long period.

And the time of plenty is primarily driven by monetary policy, is it not?

> plenty is primarily driven by monetary policy

Short-term market cycles are always driven by credit, which is in turn driven by monetary policy.

Kodak is a terrible example. That company had a long decline into irrelevance. Big companies have been doing that forever.

It's a good example because it shows the gulf between organizational/innovational rot and impeccable bookkeeping.

Kodak's signs of decay were visible at least as long ago as the late 70s vis a vis the Polaroid patent infringement case (and the cheesiness of Kodak's own knockoffs).

> this was much more true in the long ago era of regulation

It's still true. We just haven't had, in close to a generation now, the sort of bear market that permits the enforcers of fundamentals to re-emerge: liquidation and bankruptcy against overvaluation; M&A against undervaluation.

Will we? The trend has been for countries to protect their big losers, those underperforming companies that are too big to fail. Started in Japan in the 80s, then Europe in the 2000s, and the U.S. since 2009. Arguably communist countries have always functioned this way, with state-owned enterprises.

The result is a coupling between between the fate of the nation and the fate of its major employers, with loose monetary policy, regulatory capture, and explicit fiscal bailouts to protect it. Then instead of the deadwood being cleaned out, the whole country becomes deadwood, and you get lost generations and social unrest as the only way to throw out ways of doing business that aren't working is to throw out the people in power.

> just isn't worth the effort for the average ownership span.

There's no rule that says you need to hold stocks for the same average period that the rest of the market does. Analyzing securities and purchasing those that are undervalued is still an extremely profitable activity at many hedge funds and prop trading desks. The fact that the average investor is more FOMO-driven these days only makes sound analysis more valuable, just like playing poker with a drunk newbie will have higher variability but better expected value.

I don't disagree - just want to note a difference between sufficient analysis and overthinking the problem (IMHO).

This is true up until the point where your logically sound short of GME comes up against “apes together stronk”

That's why I wrote:

> higher variability but better expected value.

If you put all your money into shorting GME then yes, you will have a bad time when WSB gets excited again. If you have a widely spread portfolio of shorts in overhyped companies with weak fundamentals and longs in underhyped companies with strong fundamentals, having a few trades go against you is not the end of the world.

This is a wildly optimistic way of framing the long-term value of the market.

It’s more likely that the crappy companies will live for the long term - if you measure “crappy” by anything resembling consumer/client benefit.

Are these the same markets? The stock market between investors and companies could be a voting machine while the “stuff” market between customers and companies could be a weighing machine. Then it would be a difference of which market rather than which timescale, potentially allowing the investor market to prop up companies failing in the stuff market for long periods due to nothing more than investor popularity.

I remember reading Graham for a finance class in the mid-2000s, and even then it was several decades old.

It's a relevant read if you work in securities analysis. If you're an investor however, the takeaways of the book are more philosophical than actionable. Too much has changed in the market since Graham's time.

The idea of an Uber-type company using VC billions to cover its losses would have been completely alien to him. As would companies doing an end run around the IPO process with SPACs.

It’s still all rational: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_fool_theory

True. Because rational doesn't mean logical, ethical or moral.

It merely means that given a certain set of axioms, heuristics and circumstances, it arrives at the same or nearly similar results.

The law is rational in this sense but not always logical or moral.

The one things with markets today is, thanks to QE, they are NO LONGER value/price seeking system at all. The proof of this is the cross correlation across all asset and instrument classes hovering around 80%-90%. That's NOT what should be happening.

> History says speculative 'investing' ends poorly

Does it? If you look past the biggest scams and bubbles, I think most research shows that a moderate amount of speculation actually decreases volatility and makes market manipulation more difficult. Speculators after all are the ones who correct the prices of assets which are being wrongly valued.

Copy / paste from elsewhere but here's a recent list of speculative investing bubbles and their outcomes:

The Japanese Nikkei is still down 40% from 1989. That was 31 years ago. The Shanghai Composite index is down 45% from 2007. That was 13 years ago. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Index is down 10% from the peak in 2007. The German DAX is a “total return” index that includes dividends. So it cannot be compared to the other indices here, or to the S&P 500. The German index that is not a total return index and therefore can be compared to the S&P 500 is the DAXK. Despite its red-hot surge in recent months, it’s still down 8% from the peak in the year 2000. That was twenty years ago. The London stock exchange index FTSE is down 13% from 1999. 21 years ago. The Italian stock index, the FTSE MIB, is down about 60% from the year 2000. 20 years ago. The French stock index, the CAC40, is down 24% from its peak in the year 2000. 20 years ago. The Spanish stock index IBEX 35 is down 58% from its peak in 2007, which was the peak of the Spanish housing bubble that collapsed with devastating results 12 years ago.

Yes, but what about all the speculation that happened that didn't lead to bubbles and actually led to improved market efficiency? My point is that you can't just look at the most obvious examples of past bubbles with full hindsight and say that all speculation is a net negative because of those.

Yes, of course, some speculation can lead to improved market efficiency. I suppose we should define at what level of speculation deems a speculative market.

"I think most research shows that a moderate amount of speculation actually decreases volatility and makes market manipulation more difficult."

I'd be interested to read such research.

To me, this current craze (Stocks, housing, crypto, etc) just doesn't pass the sniff test. It just seems off. Has for a long time. Something has to give. It doesn't make sense. I tell my friends, either things correct in a large way or we're going to be eating $50 cheeseburgers. Again, who knows!? If you did, you could make a killing.

> I'd be interested to read such research.

See here for example: https://www.bankofcanada.ca/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/wp201...

> It doesn't make sense. I tell my friends, either things correct in a large way or we're going to be eating $50 cheeseburgers.

Why not? My parents paid 50c for a cheeseburger in their youth and now I pay $5. What doesn't make sense about inflation? It is the expected way in which our market works.

A $5 burger would be super cheap in SF, difficult to find, and unlikely one worth eating.

Thanks for the link, I'll have a read. From the abstract, it clearly references only hedge funds and swap traders in the study. Most speculative markets get in trouble when retail gets involved.

> Why not? My parents paid 50c for a cheeseburger in their youth and now I pay $5. What doesn't make sense about inflation? It is the expected way in which our market works.

My point is that current asset prices only make sense relative to an $50 cheeseburger at current prices, not that inflation cannot occur and cheeseburgers won't be $50 in the future. Again, I don't have the answer. Wish I did. Wouldn't be reading HN at work but building golf courses :).

For what it’s worth, you cannot really compare non-total return indexes with one another either. You’re assuming they have had the same dividend yield during the comparison period, which isn’t a reasonable assumption. In reality, only total return indexes can be relied on for accurate information.

That makes it look like you would have lost money if you’d put it into those indices. Looking more closely (I only bothered with Nikkei), that seems unlikely. Compared to the full year average for 1989, it’s only down 15 percent. Or zooming even further out, it’s nearly double the eighties average today. If a peak is short lived enough, it’s unlikely to strongly affect people investing steadily.

It would be interesting looking at the peaks of 1/5/10 year averages that contain the actual peaks.

My point still holds true. Down 15 per over 32 year period and inflation of the Yen is down 16%. This is one famous example of how speculative investing ends poorly. 3 decades of flatline at best. Look up Japanese lost decade. It's fascinating to read about and the eerily similar to current day US.

[1] https://www.inflationtool.com/japanese-yen/1989-to-present-v...

Just in my experience as an investor, I have never seen anything like this. And I am somewhat familiar with financial history, and I have never heard of anything like this happening either.

It isn't just all the fraud SPACs, it is GME, it is AMC. You can have a business that is overvalued based on the fundamentals, but the future is always unknown. What is interesting about now is that you have companies with huge risks, that are already doing poorly today, and the market is just ignoring it (and btw, you have started to see papers appearing, both theory and practical, that explain how retail money is pushing these stocks...this is something that people in the market already understand but there is point blank ignorance from govt, media, economists, etc.). With dot-com, there was theoretical growth there. With housing, there was structural reasons why the market didn't function. There are often fundamental reasons why these things happen. With this, it is just a wave of money crashing into this small section of the market.

The only exception that occurs to me is HTZ. There was a huge media furore about that, and it turned out that was totally wrong (people who bought at the bottom got more than 10x their money in six months).

HTZ = Hertz?

Yes...I think it is HTZZ now they are out of bankruptcy.

One thing you’re ignoring is that investment doesn’t occur in the abstract. It’s literally an investment in the company, and it’s not just a bet on future results it actually can and does change the outcome.

For example GME and AMC were able to wipe out their debt snd get a bunch of cash in the door to run their business with via all this retail investment. It’s quite possible having that money will change their story from failure to success.

Betting on horses doesn’t make the horse go faster but betting on companies can.

Are you familiar with Mogdilani-Miller? Being able to pay off debt does not increase the value of equity. The capital structure has changed but that makes no difference for the actual value of the business (which is determined by cash flows).

And, ofc, it is massively value-dilutive in practice for shareholders. Debt is extremely cheap and equity is expensive. And, in this case, massive amounts of value have been destroyed by issuing equity at a valuation that can't be sustained by cash flows. Indeed, what has happened is the exact opposite of what you think has happened: the share price has increased, and that has given management the opportunity to destroy value by rinsing shareholders. Debt holders that were facing total loss have been bailed out by equity. Whatever the value of the debt was, that is the close to the amount that has been lost (because the value of that debt was close to zero).

This is Corp Finance 101 but the marginal investor today doesn't understand this (unf, debt investors do, bankers do, mgmt do...they have made out with a couple of yards, equity got rinsed once again). Nothing goes anywhere in finance. All that is happening in AMC and GME is people trading capital loss between themselves (and debt investors finding someone to buy their capital loss at 100c in the dollar).

It’s not that deep.

The basic premise I’m putting forward, which is that in general investing in an company might have the potential to help that company succeed, is utterly trivial and obvious.

Also trivial and obvious is that fact that an excessive debt burden can cripple and kill a company that might have otherwise succeeded.

There is indeed subtlety to this, needless to say. But basic observation is essentially unarguable: when a whole ton of people decide to buy stock in a company it affects that company’s prospects.

Correct. Lots of people bought into the stock at a valuation in excess of fundamental value, bankers saw an opportunity, equity holders got rinsed, and debt holders got paid in full immediately on a junk credit.

I am by no means an economic expert, far from it. To me it seems so, that there is way to much money flowing around, looking for an outlet. And with interest rates being all time lows since 2008 parking that money at a bank doesn't work anymore. Before 2007/8, the problem was too much money being made too easily. We solved that by creating more money. And we repeated that with Covid.

That's ZIRP for ya.

https://www.readmargins.com/p/zirp-explains-the-world

This article summarizes my thoughts extremely well, thanks for that! I would throw in food and drink delivery with scooters, so!

I have thought a lot about this. I am not sure that I have an answer because the way in which everyone (inc. myself) thinks about financial markets appears to be totally wrong (I am in the UK, we have had several rounds of QE since 2010...every time, the BoE gave a different explanation of how QE works).

But it is easier to comprehend that, most obviously in the EU, there is a shortage of risk-free assets. It is less that there is too much money and more that there is a mismatch between assets required by investors to match liabilities and what there actually is. My guess is that over the next ten years, we see a move to understand the demand for financial assets in more depth (and from this perspective, QE seems like financial vandalism). Framing purely in terms of supply doesn't really explain what is happening or why people are doing things that make no sense.

I also don't think 2007/08 was a function of too much money at all. It was a combination of structural issues, poor regulation, and a relatively normal financial cycle (people buying things because other people were buying them). What happened in 2008 was the market working effectively. It was after 2008 when the odd things started happening (one very interesting thing to me was Blackstone's property business...they were doing the most overvalued deals at the very top of the market in 2006/07...and they ended up making multiples, that really isn't normal, and the bailout in the view of the Fed was the market working...which is, ofc, totally backwards).

That makes more sense, thanks for the post!

> History says speculative 'investing' ends poorly

If it ends poorly for someone(s), then it ends fabulously for someone(s) else. The same could be said for gambling... the lure of easy money is difficult for people to resist.

It’s not zero sum though

Buying and selling stocks (or crypto, or ...) on its own is zero-sum. If you sell your stock, someone else has to buy the stock for that same amount of money. You can only make money if someone else loses.

The loser does not realize they have lost money immediately, and while the stock price is up it looks like there are only winners. The losers only realize they have lost money after the asset collapses in price while they own the asset. That is the beauty of these schemes. The losers are already there, they just don't know it yet. Of course they are also heavily motivated to keep the price up to prevent themselves from becoming losers (hence HODL, "apes together strong", etc). These schemes can go on for a while, and a lot of people can make a lot of money in the process (again, at the expense of the losers, no money is being created here).

Stocks are only not zero sum once you account for e.g. dividends being paid out. That applies to companies with a solid foundation, but it is unlikely a company with no income stream that is rooted in fraud is going to be paying out sufficient dividends to their stock owners to account for the purchase price.

It's a thing created by humans, used by humans, who assign value to tickers, where everyone tries to win and some have to lose for others to win.

It can only be a game of cat psychology.

It’s a game even without human psychology. The human psychology just adds elements to the game.

Whether it ends badly depends on how and for whom you score the game.

Same here. Houses of cards can stay up as long as there are enough people who believe that it's not a house of cards.

No wonder we have a misinformation crisis. It works for politicians, crypto markets, meme stocks, regular stocks, you name it.

"History says speculative 'investing' ends poorly but this time, who knows?"

It'll still end poorly, but if you choose & time trades correctly it'll end poorly for other people. Choosing and timing your trades is left as an exercise for the reader.

https://coinmarketcap.com

Tether, either a scam or a criminal money laundering enterprise (or both), has a market cap of over $50B. DOGE, a joke based on an old meme of a Shiba Inu, has a market cap of over $1B.

Not only is the real Tesla's market cap not irrational, at this point I'd say any company that actually has anything of value should be valued in the hundreds of billions. The pizza place around the corner should be at least $100B in that they actually make something.

Thank /r/WSB for that. No one can short dog companies anymore for fear of being short squeezed.

That subreddit is just a scapegoat. There are so many other places people are looking for the next big return.

Also you can short dog companies still. But if there are to many people shorting it, like GME had, you do run this risk. That's not any internet forum's fault.

That said, it can be really hard to make money betting on stocks to go down. I believe it was Care.com where people were putting out similar reports of how terrible the company was & the horrific incidents happening. In the first half of 2018 you had articles pointing out all these issues. It's stock kept going up around 30% before it finally crashed in the beginning of 2020.

Of course it is only fair to also call out all the quality companies where short investor companies try to keep the price down for ages or publish BS to profit off shorts. That was a big thing for those who were happy to short squeeze during GME.

In like, 99% of the cases where you make a bet that a ticker will go down your enemy is timing it right given the high volatility on dog companies, not a "squeeze".

Literally when I first heard about the company, being interested in EV I started looking in to them.

10 minutes into a interview with the founder I was instantly convinced that they were a fake, fraud company.

They had a very clear strategy, and as a scammer, one must give him some credit. He managed to push a company to higher evaluation then GM based on literally nothing but marketing and false claims.

Been a long turbulent road, lots of interest payments, lots of downvotes, but soon I will be able to close out my massive short position that I opened 10 months ago against this company.

Reference: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24473631

Curious what your average borrow cost is, if you’re comfortable saying.

Given the absurdity of cult bagholders that formed around this thing, I’d imagine it was reasonably hard to borrow.

How much do you stand to make?

In the 6 figures

i would hold out, i think it's going to zero!

Yup, holding out.

> He was freed on a $100 million bond secured against two of his properties in Utah.

It's nice to be rich in this part of the world.

I doubt that he had to put up $100 million to be released - probably more like $1m to $2m. When Tom Barack was released on a $250m bond earlier this month, it was secured by $5m in cash.

Nikola looked like a fairly obvious scam to me the first time I've read about them. I find it surprising and strange that they were able to hoodwink so many people.

You'd be suprised how many idiots there are.

It sounds a lot like Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos - some investors want to find the next Steve Jobs so badly that they get blinded by the sophistry.

My web services company built an eBay/Craigslist clone for Milton about 10 years ago. Trump level bullshitter but with an indomitable drive. Despite being a returned Mormon missionary Trevor has a loose ethical screw.

Any good stories you can share?

He told us he has just cashed out of an alarm company for $1M when he engaged us. Turns out that was typical Trevor hype... he had gotten nowhere near that amount. Would sometimes pay his invoices with stacks of $50 American Express prepaid cards. Drove my bookkeeper bananas. I assume the reason was rewards related. His claims for traffic on his Upillar platform were ludicrous; made out of whole cloth. Hired Glenn Beck to shill for him. Drove a comically lifted 4WD truck with UPillar emblazoned all over it and seem to always have plenty of motorized toys... boats, ATVs, etc. All funded by investors. At the end he poached one of our employees and left us. I was glad to be rid of him; the engagement was never comfortable for me.

That’s hilarious! So Trevor is like a real-life Erlich Bachman from Silicon Valley, complete with an Aviato car. Meanwhile he’s churning prepaid cards to farm a few dollars per card.

Nobody'll see this, but still,

> Milton pled not guilty to the criminal charges in a Manhattan courtroom Thursday afternoon. He was freed on a $100 million bond secured against two of his properties in Utah. He is barred from contacting investors.

I saw a story a while ago somewhere about people selling houses for "wait what" amounts obviously more than they were worth, as a way to funnel cash around.

I wonder if the properties in question ($50m each?) were independently valued as such, or if the properties were deemed appropriately equitable (if that's the right way to put it) on the back of "I paid this much for this property".

If the latter, it's possible the bond's value is itself tied to a payout. Which is a bit meta.

Still has a $5B market cap. We live in problematic times where populism often matters more than any kind of objective reality.

Every stock seems to have a little bit of this factor.

> The SEC asked the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of New York to permanently bar him from acting as an officer at a company that issues securities, to disgorge all ill-gotten gains and pay a fine

Prison? Where is the prison part?

Sentence before:

> The Securities and Exchange Commission > also < filed civil securities fraud charges against Milton on Thursday.

The SEC is not involved in criminal proceedings which could result in prison or other criminal penalties, so no point looking for that in the parts of the article that discuss the civil actions of the SEC.

These are “civil” matters. You don’t get pepper sprayed for financial crimes, or environmental crimes, or wage theft, or…

They even named the company to evoke Tesla and form an impression that they competing with them. This is a pure scam but now they have enough money to legitimize themselves. This is actually a great outcome for their investors, the CEO takes the blame and the company becomes legit. Just sad that this is accepted as normal. I will not be surprised if the stock sky rockets tomorrow.

10 billion market cap sound like a good evaluation for a company founded on complete fraud. The car experts at GM will probably give them another billion

> Last September, Hindenburg Research said in a paper that it was short-selling Nikola stock and labelled the company a "fraud", a charge it denied.

Shorts win! Thanks for the market function

And yet, the number of people who think shorts are somehow evil (another EV CEO comes to mind) is absolutely mind boggling. I’ve heard relatively intelligent people explain to me that shorting should be illegal.

What value does Niokla have at this point and why?

Serious question. Been wondering it since the Hindenburg Research stuff last fall.

If you want to commit fraud without any trouble from regulators, go start a decentralized crypto currency.

Indicts != convicts, fwiw.

It's hard to overstate the insane difficulty of running an automotive company profitably. Tesla is an exception. I don't sympathize with Trevor, but I can understand why he did what he did. It's a fraud, but I get it why it was done.

What's more surprising is the incompetence to come up with a working prototype over years with so much funding!

It's not like there are no electric motors or large batteries on the market. It just have to work for a good hour and they can't even do that. It's theranos level of embarrassment and fraud, maybe even worse, because theranos might have been an physical impossibility but Tesla already demonstrated that it is entirely possible to do what Nikola claims to (at least in prototyping).

next startup: an electric car that analyzes your health while you drive. AI to self drive AND to predict if you’ll develop any health issues!

Looked at the first name, not look at the last name too!

Market cap today: 4.5 billion. Just amazing.

And what about Elon?

Obligatory mention of hilarious breakdown on the history of Nikola motors:

https://youtu.be/1oqqnkkTKVM

and Elon?

Most Silicon Valley “CRUD” startups have fraud baked in. It’s just whose holding the bag in the end that matters. Sometimes it’s the VC funds early in the stage, sometimes it’s the late stage investors ala WeWork SoftBank and usually it’s the retail bag holders post IPO.

Sorry - what’s a CRUD startup? CRUD as in create, read, update, delete?

Yes! It refers to that all web-applications are "just" CRUD-applications in the end, reading and writing data to and from a database (e.g. Angular and React).

That's a uselessly wide brush because it's all CRUD. Different companies specialize in different areas, carving out their own, highly profitable niche. Customized hardware for doing CRUD on (Apple, Juniper, Cisco), specialized software for high-performance CRUD (Oracle), selling access to systems for doing CRUD on (AWS/Azure/GCP), giving away access to custom CRUD software for free, and selling advertisement in the Read step (Facebook, Google Search), charging fees for use of custom CRUD software (AirBnB). Hell, money itself is just CRUD in various databases (bank/visa/the fed/blockchain/etc) and various companies make a killing off that (Venmo/PayPal/Square).

Where's Al Gore? This is the one big company that can stop, if not reverse, global climate change.

now do elon

Are you claiming that Tesla vehicles are fraudulent and only drive when rolling down hills?

The number of Tesla haters on HN is bizarre.

You have to realize there are a LOT of people on here who fail to launch successful startups. Lots of projecting and sour grapes.

Ya, that's a good point, and I never thought about the selection bias.

Also, most people only read headlines. There has been so much FUD in the news about Tesla and Musk. If you’re not following things closely, watching all his interviews, etc, then it’s easy to believe what you read in sensationalized clickbait headlines

Musk is pretty much the dream of what every nerd wants to become. There's a lot of jaded people on HN who think they are just as smart/talented as Musk but don't have anywhere near the success.

They deal with the cognitive dissonance by calling him a fraud/scammer or wanting to see him fail. Fanboys of Musk aren't much better, Musk just seems to attract extremists on either side of the aisle who either love him or hate him

I agree, but regardless I dont see why we call cant agree that for all of the guy's faults, he is done some truly incredible things and he is still pretty young. He is a net positive for the world.

Because of my consulting gigs, I know of at least 3 multimillionaires (>$100MM), who are hoarding air tanks (similar to scuba tanks, but there is already a small company that produces much larger, home-style tanks for this purpose) because someone in Musk circles told them Musk is doing so, so they assume this could be end-of-the-world scenario.

Imagine our atmosphere to be like a giant balloon. And SpaceX rockets are scratching [2] that balloon surfaces every time they go up [1]. Who knows, maybe one day one of the rockets will scratch it enough and our ionosphere goes pop, so to speak.

[1] conspiracy theory much? Here is an article based on scientists approach: https://fortune.com/2018/03/26/elon-musk-spacex-falcon-9-ion...

[2] funny story, a friend who works for NASA told me years ago how upset the management was when they found out that SpaceX rockets are not flying flat enough to enter the Orbit in a gently manner. There is no gov. oversight (yet) because there are very few companies that can reach LEO so in theory regulations are not important, but few people know NASA spent more money flying rockets because they fly them in a way not to tore holes in an ionosphere which probably I don't have to tell you how important it is to ALL life on Earth. In some way, today's SpaceX is a space pirate, and had there been proper regulations, they would have not be saving anywhere near as much money as they do now flying when comparing to NASA.

I don't understand how this is relevant?

I don’t understand why you say musk fans aren’t any better.

If you’re going to be a fan of someone, why not someone who is transitioning the world to sustainable energy and trying to make humanity a multi-planetary species?

there's a difference between a fan and a fan boy who worships everything he does.

fraudulent? yes.

“full self driving”? fraud.

Auto pilot full self driving is fraudulent and been coming next year for half a decade.

No, parent is likely saying Elon could be indicted for fraud as well. He wasn't exactly exonerated by the SEC for 'funding secured', and there are a number of lawsuits outstanding, most notably the Solar City one.

Just because you have an innovative and popular product doesn't mean you can't conduct fraud?

Sounds like you think this is a non ridiculous comparison? A market moving statement comparable to theranos vaporware

Did Enron just use aggressive accounting? Did Wirecard just overpay for its acquisitions and hide the losses in its balance sheet?

What type of fraud is still okay - where do you draw the line?

Sounds like you're trying to blur the fraud line and make weak comparisons when no one is in disagreement over Enron, Wildcard or Nicola

FSD (Full Self Driving) feature in Tesla Cars is fraudulently advertised and has put many Tesla customers lives at great risk and has also killed them too. [0]

Do you not want to warn others about this scam that Tesla is selling that can cause someone to believe it and lose their life when the software malfunctions or gets confused?

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/05/business/tesla-autopilot-...

Tesla is selling Full Self Driving when they do not have the technology.

I've been following Tesla and Elon Musk for a few years already and I've seen many instances when you can see Elon doing dubious stuff.

Just before of Tesla's acquisition of Solar City (his cousin's company) they presented the Solar roof [0]. It has been reported [1] that the roof just didn't work, it didn't generate any electricity. In fact, my understanding is that even today they are having many issues with the system. How is announcing a "solar roof" that doesn't generate electricity different that announcing a truck that doesn't move?

Also, people often forget that when Nikola went mainstream, an email from Elon Musk was leaked to the press stating that Tesla was going to ramp up production of the Tesla Semi [3]. Goes without saying that the Tesla Semi has been delayed yet another year since its unveiling back in 2017.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4sfwDyiPTdU

[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/40422084/inside-steel-pulse-the-...

[2] https://www.fool.com/investing/2020/06/10/musk-presses-the-g...

Like many famous people that have a massive cult following, some people like the current Tesla CEO, are allowed and able to get away with lots of fraud and can still continue to mislead their own customers. Like the dangerous and faulty 'Full Self Driving' software that is killing their customers. [0]

The villains of this week is Trevor Milton and Nikola Motors. Tesla will probably get away with [0] no matter how many people expose FSD which puts lots of drivers lives at risk.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/05/business/tesla-autopilot-...

Like MLM's - just cultism.

How is this any different from what Elon Musk told his investors for the past decade?

I don’t think the lies are of the same type. Lying (or charitably, being unreasonably optimistic) about future timelines seems less egregious than faking a demo.

In Tesla’s case, bigger the lie more they believed.

I was wondering how soon someone would try to trash Tesla (or Elon) as it's completely off-topic and a false equivalence.

I see a lot of Teslas on the road, as I also drive one.

I see a lot of Superchargers around, and see (yup, I trust it) a lot of people around the world using them.

I see a lot of Powerwalls getting sold and installed.

I see huge Megapacks getting sold and installed.

I see a lot of solar being sold and installed.

I see manufacturing plants being built around the world.

I see that Panasonic is selling Tesla millions upon millions of battery cells, so they must be going somewhere.

I saw their earnings report for Q2 2021 and it sure seems like they are doing very well.

I see they have massive data and super computing power, currently being used and being built.

I see there are 70k+ people working for and getting paid to work for Tesla.

Oh, FSD is late. We've all underestimated our projects. So, this is the equivalency you're looking for? I see betas of FSD in cars on the road. I know people that are actively testing it. It's a hard problem, not a lie. It's just someone being overly optimistic, not overtly optimistic. I'm an investor, I understand the problem because I know what I invest in. I am not angry nor do I believe it to be a lie.

It's not worth engaging with these idiots.

Theranos indictment when

Three years ago? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Holmes#Criminal_char...

So he made billions on lies and he's going to keep those right?

Read the article

Nope, the SEC demands to get all the gains back plus pay a fine. He may go bankrupt after this.

I would expected that someone like him had secured millions in offshore accounts well hidden from authorities...

A grand jury will indict a ham sandwich. So this is nothing to great.

I thought Elon was the Electric car maker most likely to get caught perpetuating a fraud?

I'm amazed at the lengths people go to bring Elon in on discussions. Can we get Elon Derangement Syndrome in the DSM?

You think there’s a big leap from Nikola -> Tesla -> Elon?

There are a number of tin-foli hat minded people that have elon as the top of the tree in a number of criminal enterprises ranging from mexican drug and people smuggling cartels to good old fashion accounting fraud.

The two electric car celebrity startups have been trading blows for years, perhaps the guy who jsut got convicted is behind some of the stories?

How do they define fraud? Lying? Isn't every company doing this?

Some employee gets fired because they misled in their resume and that's fine but when companies do it it's just marketing and raising hype.

Importantly, every public company is not doing this.

Were it a private company, like most startups at this stage tend to be, these lies would not have been securities fraud, I don't think.

IMO this would have been a negative case of misrepresentation were this a private startup, but probably not more than a single standard deviation away from the norm, at least in my admittedly fairly limited understanding of the industry.

When you're from a culture of, well, presenting the best version of the truth possible (startup world), you can get into some very hot water if you play fast and loose as a publicly traded company, and Trevor Milton is finding out.

> Were it a private company, like most startups at this stage tend to be, these lies would not have been securities fraud, I don't think.

Theranos has entered the chat

Private placements are still securities.

That is exactly what I was thinking.

Elizabeth Holmes.

I think even if you are a private company, lying is still a type of fraud. And private companies still have shareholders. Just because they are not public companies doesn't mean they can just lie to their shareholders, although perhaps it is more difficult to prove?

The only area that I can think of where you can get away with lying about an industry or asset is when it comes to crypto. You can make sky high predictions and because they aren't labeled as securities there is no victim. Because they use the word decentralized there is no one responsible.

What is lying, then? Startups very frequently pitch the "best version of themselves" to potential investors, it's (in my understanding) extremely common.

The problem with Theranos and now Nikola is that the industries they're doing it in have very specific laws that you can violate just by speaking/writing. That isn't usually the case with startups, and so when one founder stretches the truth about how far along their SaaS platform is and it's fine, Nikola rolls a car down a hill and their CEO gets indicted.

I just think there are some habits that come out of SV in particular that are fine within that bubble, almost expected really, but come out not looking very good if you try to apply that behavior/logic to a more scrutinized part of the market.

A great opportunity to short $NKLA, if you haven't already done it.

I wouldn't recommend it. Many of us have known for months and months that the company is 100% fraud but the market stays irrational.

I'm actually a little surprised that shares fell so much on this news, I'd have thought that this info - or wide expectation of it - was already discounted in the price.

Is it, er, all downhill from here?

Well they fell only slightly (surprised they fell at all actually) because Trevor Milton was named, not Nikola. So they let him go and now he personally is getting sued, not the company.

The CNBC article said 11pc in early trading. Just checked the price and it's 7.9pc down atm. That's still quite a drop, I'd say.

Gotcha - I think the parent said it only dropped slightly so I was reacting to that news at that time. It's definitely a significant drop as you point out. I'm a little surprised at such a large drop though, the small drop made a little more sense to me.

Well it turns out that my $NKLA short went well and I'm still up more than 20pc since I placed my short position 5 days ago. Just closed 75% of my position and set my stop loss to break even.

> I wouldn't recommend it. Many of us have known for months and months that the company is 100% fraud

Is this the time where I say that I have the last laugh? I think so.

As for the down-voters; they are really quiet today aren't they?

The markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.

"It's priced in"

If you're reading an article about the indicting the founder of a company and someone is posting on HN that it's a good time to short, then it's too late to short.

Interestingly, if they had shorted it at the time they made the comment, they would currently be ahead.

And if the ball landed on black instead of red the last time I bet on roulette I'd also be ahead.

Performance analysis like this after the fact doesn't really have any relevance unless there was some information missed.

Further reading on this in Adaptive Markets : Financial Evolution at the Speed of Thought. Has some theories around information flow and market participant behavior that permit edge to persist.

Well 13 days later after calling my NKLA short position and closing 75% of my position [0] I now made more money after it fell below $10.00 on the 12th of August as of this comment.

So it seems I'm the one leaving with profit after closing the remaining 25% of my short position while you sit their and watch.

It turns out that I'm the one laughing all the way to the bank.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27996773

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28050958

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