Nikola founder to be sentenced for federal fraud charges | Hacker News Reader

Nikola founder to be sentenced for federal fraud charges

cnbc.com

204 pointsgeox182 comments

Trevor Milton's infamous "html5 supercomputer" quote often gets shared in discussions about Nikola, and for good reason. It's one of my all-time favorite bullshit quotes:

"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." [1]

[1] https://www.truckinginfo.com/330475/whats-behind-the-grille-...

It reads like something ChatGPT would come up with

I am not very familiar with this founder and his company, but how does a guy like this make it past any level of due diligence on the part of his investors?

With a smile on their face and a billion dollar check in their pocket. Investors don't mind the bullshit if they're on the profiting side of it.

Man, I am a one-time failed founder and apparently I put way too much thought into it, as one of multiple failings.

Meanwhile Adam Neumann gets a next go.

Early investors aren't trying to find valuable, profitable, or innovative companies that will make a lot of money. Their goal is to sell to someone else at a higher price sometime down the line. Therefore the actual reality of the business is not useful, and often purposely ignored if the story seems like it can pull in enough bag holders.

Do you think he would have gotten that far in today's interest rate environment? I mean, are investors paying more attention now, or does the bigger idiot theory still work?

It’s about cashflow now, and that’s a lot harder (but not impossible!) to BS around.

A theory I've read on here is that VC returns come from a handful of hyper-successful firms, and the challenge is getting in on the deals in those firms at all, and the way you do that is by building a reputation as a visionary and generous investor by investing in ludicrous bullshit on founder-friendly terms. From this point of view, money given to Nikola isn't a bad investment, it's a marketing expense.

They did a SPAC in 2020 so his 'investors' were mostly the general public. Actual investors were pretty skeptical of them, e.g. Hindenburg shorted them extensively and called them a fraud.

Another one you may not have heard is Elon Musk.. he's been delivering self driving cars since 2015

I am not a Musk fan at all, in fact I despise Musk 4.0, but what he accomplished prior to losing his mind is undeniable. He founded SpaceX, which absolutely accelerated our access to space by 20-40 years. Half of the satellites in orbit belong to SpaceX. SpaceX put more mass into orbit last year than all other countries combined.

He accelerated the adoption of electric vehicles by at least ten years. If the worst of climate change predictions turn out to be true, this could make him one of the most beneficial humans of our time... that's assuming that his naive geopolitical angling doesn't kill us all, and that his brain implants don't turn us into corporate zombies.

My point is, there is much about him to criticize, but he has delivered a lot in the past.

If the worst of climate change predictions turn out to be true, this could make him one of the most beneficial humans of our time...

Not really. Methane from cows causes more harm to the environment than cars do. If he had gotten the world to go vegan, that would have been doing the impossible. Musk made an idea fashionable and sold carbon credits.

I mean, Musk went the practical route. Make things that nearly everyone wants... fast cars that you can refuel at home for next to no cost.

But I hear you about food. However, the sad joke is: we don't need vegan purity. If we could just convince everyone in wealthy countries to skip meat for only two days per week, then the we might actually hit 2C max temp increase. But everyone is all about paleo meat-only or vegan/vegetarian purity crap. We just needed some moderation, but that's not as sexy as being a vegan or a Hummer driver.

We will pilot our extremes straight into the ground.

I completely agree with you about 'vegan purity'.

Making people abstain from meat completely will turn people into the meat-eating equivalent of alcoholics. I bring up the comparison because sobriety is contingent on a period of continued abstinence along with veganism or vegetarianism. You will be mocked if you called yourself vegan and ate meat a few times a month, as you would be mocked if you called yourself sober and drank a few times a month.

Many people look at a lifetime of denying themselves a basic pleasure and rightly balk at the prospect and put it off to some distant 'later' or create a rationalization for why they don't need to do it. This wouldn't be nearly as much of a problem if we quit using absolutist terms like 'vegan' and instead came up with a way to make it a moral issue to acknowledge the problems associated with meat consumption without shaming those who limit it but do not abstain from it.

Basically -- advocating that the solution is a 'vegan' one is probably not going to work, and if it does it will create (at least initially) a population of guilt-ridden people and an associated culture of shame. Let's think of a better way to do it.

nobody's advocating that. I used the example of making the world go 100% vegan because it is an example of a thing which would be incredibly effective, yet which any reasonable person would consider impossible.

> I mean, Musk went the practical route.

sure. but going the practical route isn't being some kind of hero. you don't go to a hero's gravestone and see the words "well, he did what he could."

Musk harnessed a very powerful desire which a lot of Americans share: to counteract climate change by buying stuff they like. If there's any credit to hand out, it's that desire which deserves it, especially since Musk answered the "buying stuff they like" part vigorously and the "counteracting climate change" part to a far lesser extent.

And then turned around and pretended to be more interested in the part he did less to accomplish.

All the scientifically relevant stuff would have gotten into space, Musk, SpaceX or not. All those Starlink satelites? I am still not convinced they provide any actual added value, besides giving SpaceX another product to raise funds against (Elon tried the same thing with FSD, which worked out less good so far).

Also, we were well on our path to EVs, Tesla (not Musk himself alone) accelerated that. Ten years so is bold claim, and attributing that all to one single person is just nonesense.

Edit: Tesla made shit tons of money by selling CO2 credits to legacy car makers, so in reality Musk (rather Tesla, but that distinctions is difficult) had close to no positive impact on climate change and instead profited of others continue to polute. All Musk cares about is his image as being the tech-god savior of mankind, that and money.

> All those Starlink satelites? I am still not convinced they provide any actual added value

Tell that to the Ukrainians. I'm told that they're big fans of Starlink as of late, I wonder why.

Oh, they work. Issue is, I know for a fact that there would have been alternative solutions for that. Or how do you think other militaries operate their communications?

Buying space on commercial satellites and encrypting them. SpaceX and Starlink are cool because they're so much cheaper.

My car drove itself to work this morning, were you trying to be sarcastic?

You clearly haven’t raised money from investors with that question. /j

Investors are sheep and follow their peers. There are only a handful of mavericks in investment circles, and they generate the best and the worst returns.

Consider that they all invested without seeing the engine or looking under the hood of the demo vehicle. It’s in the investor lawsuit — they even poke fun at themselves about it.

Bingo. You see this in public shareholder calls all the time. Today, you can't find a tech company that doesn't say something like "We are integrating AI with LLM into our technology to blah". They don't say that because it's a meaningful or good product, they say that because investors give you a 10% stock bump just for saying "LLM".

The same thing happened with crypto, machine learning, web 2.0, etc. Investors love a good buzzword and will reward a company handsomely for using them.

Hell, that's like 90% of the reason FTX became as big as it was.

It was wild seeing companies have their biggest stock jump ever simply by talking about crypto magic beans on an earnings call.

My company just did a shareholder meeting. Of everything we described (and we had a KILLER year) basically the only questions that were asked revolved around our usage of LLMs. It didn't matter that we made a ton of money, new products, and happy customers. What mattered was how we are adding AI.

Well, please tell us, how are you adding AI?

I say this only one-quarter sarcastically, I would genuinely like to know. The only real applications of LLMs that I have seen so far are devs "learning" new languages.

Ha.

Part of our software has a data ingestion and normalization process that can be somewhat costly. Basically, on a near per client basis we get data that needs to be transformed into our data model. We are currently investigating into using LLMs to setup our normalization DSL (or at least fill it out as best it can before a human signs off on it).

There's also an investigation going on to allow a client to ask an LLM about there data. I'm not sure how well that one will pan out.

I'm feeling the "we need to adopt AI because it's the hot new thing/investors want to hear it" pressure at work nonstop, including some annoying mandatory trainings on it. My brother in Christ, I'm still trying to get my teammates to use git and package management, AI is going to have to wait a little bit.

ChatGPT can (probably? I haven't checked) use git and package management. Maybe you should replace your colleagues with it.

To be completely honest ChatGPT would probably generate fewer vulnerabilities per line of code than my colleagues. Sadly that's not my call, and at least I get paid well to clean up their messes and put out their fires.

This comment is hideously honest and kind of darkly hilarious.

Now I can’t help but wonder if there is an introduced vulnerability per colleague metric we should be tracking?

I feel you on this one.

maybe this is why ChatGPT outputs some of the things it outputs

garbage in, garbage out

Yet more proof that we could replace CEOs with ChatGPT and lose nothing.

Trevor Milton is to CEOs what Billy Mitchell is to pro gamers

Billy Mitchell is a liar and a cheater, but he actually is really good at Donkey Kong. He has a publicly verified (in front of a crowd) score over 900,000. Much like how Lance Armstrong is both an excellent cyclist and a doped up cheater.

Billy is definitely an awful human being in other regards than just his cheating though, at least from what I've been able to tell.

This is sort of unfair because I’m sure this must’ve been part of the training set. But hilarious nonetheless. https://chat.openai.com/share/6a1fdfb4-9228-480f-961e-fa2c4b...

I like how it adds in a positive environmental impact completely out of its ass, just like a real Marketer!

Might be because the prompt is about an electric vehicle, buyers of which would be interested in environmental impact.

ChatGPT is all about replies that are believable. If there is real data,cool. But if not, also cool.

Just like people!

This is substantially worse than anything ChatGPT would come up with.

Edit: never mind: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38686399

It’s like a math proof lol.

Validated peak tech. We have created an unlimited bullshit generator.

Honestly, it doesn't - I can't imagine ChatGPT producing this density of blatant bullshit, not without a specialized prompt forcing it to. Bad as it is, ChatGPT by default still has some statistically average dignity.

If I was already an investor and saw that, my eyes would bug out so fast that they'd leave my skull and achieve orbital escape velocity. That quote is peak Dilbert boss.

LOL soooo good. The principles never get old!!

Yet GM still gave them millions

Mary led and that mattered.

Netflix has a couple series, a “Dictator’s playbook” and “Mafia boss’ playbook”.

What they really need to do is make one for tech scroungers and frauds like SBF, Holmes, Newman, Nikola founder, etc.

Why stop there? These are the obvious scams, but let's look deeper. Let's look at how "legit" companies are screwing their users by using all of their personal data and convincing the public that everything is perfectly normal

There's a series about Newman and another about Holmes out there. Both are quite enjoyable.

Given GM's commitment to actively removing the most popular and asked-for feature in the automotive world from their own infotainment systems, I'm not even surprised. This is a company that has proven before and continues to prove that they simply don't give a fuck about technology, they've realized they can keep throwing gimmicks or buzzwords at consumers and maintain just enough mind-share to stay relevant. It's no shock to me that a company with that sort of culture willingly bought into the same kind of flashy demos and mosaics of buzzwords that they themselves take part in.

GM does not make cars for the consumers, GM makes cars for the investors. And the investors loved the idea of additional revenue from apps&subscriptions on the entertainment system

I literally bought puts immediately.

Reality - If you were an investor and saw this your check book would bug out.

That's a good one. But in terms of sheer cluelessness, hubris, and word salad incoherency I still prefer this quote from Jeff Davis, co-founder of Razorfish. They were valued at $4B in 2000.

"I think this definitely is not a fad, what's occurring right now. This is absolutely real; this is a revolution; we're packing rifles; and this is going to be something that's going to change the course of the way the world is functioning. We've asked our clients to recontextualize their business. We've recontextualized what it is to be a services business. We radically transform businesses to invent and reinvent them."

Their actual business? Building web sites for other companies.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-dot-com-kids/

Sounds like he was bang on right?

That wasn't wrong in 2000, just bad timing.

I mean, circa 2000 where was the BS?

everywhere

Back Street's back, all right!

I mean, sure, but didn’t every single one of those clients have to adjust everything because of the rise of digital?

“Just a website” was common criticism and still is.

Great quote though. Those were heady days.

So not unlike the elevator pitch for most of the "LLM for $industry" pitches floating around then :-)

Wonder how many of them will still exist as brands in 24 years' time...

None, but they’ll sell and exit with a few mil like bandits in the near future while you and I toil at our 9 to 5 :P

They do this because it works.

Until sometimes it doesn't.

Oh, there is always SoftBank to the rescue.

Not even ChatGPT could hallucinate this.

That sounds like a challenge!

> ChatGPT CEO: Our company has spearheaded the development of Quantum Neural Cloud Computing, a revolutionary paradigm in the realm of artificial intelligence and data processing. We've seamlessly integrated quantum computing principles with neural network architectures, creating an unparalleled synergy that redefines the boundaries of computational capabilities.

Despite being on shaky ground due to local minima, barren plateaus, classical simulability, and more, variational quantum computing is definitely a real field. ChatGPT can't even hallucinate properly.

Oh my god. The audacity to say that.. to even think of saying that bs!!!

Also this snippet: “The truck uses voice-activated controls rather than pushing buttons and reaching for various controls to help maintain a driver's focus on the driving task. “

…is bound to never have problems haha /s

And the other hapf of Nikolas name is sellingg that as the latest shit in order to save a buck on levers and buttons.

Because nothing does more to increase driver focus than getting in a heated argument with a machine. My rental car last month, towards the end of a long drive in a snowstorm, told me it was "time to take a break" and displayed a coffee cup on the dash where the speedometer used to be. I swear if it wasn't a rental car I would have put my fist through that screen.

I was driving a new company vehicle recently and while I'm cruising at highway speeds, it would pop up a warning that my washer fluid was low. Not sure when the optimal time to tell me is, but I can almost guarantee telling me at 60 mph is below optimal.

That sounds illegal. I thought even Tesla got dinged for moving the defrost option. Obscuring the speed seems bonkers.

Car had more than one speedometer. There was a mechanical speedo and tach on either side of the screen, with a digital speed display in the middle.

https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-tesla-cars-being-produced-now...

I don't think a single one of those sentences makes any sense at all, except for HTML5 being very secure, which is trivially obvious since it's not even a programming language.

It sounds like something Elon Musk would say.

Except it's missing a 2-5 year timeline that will never come to fruition.

Makes me think that reality is truly leaking in some way. That's something a worse model of LLM's would create.

that's something Roy and Moss would have written for Jen

The whole Nikola situation was fascinating to me at the time.

I shorted the shares and bought puts in the days to couple of months following the Hindenburg publication. I was surprised at how long the shares held up; they were still trading around $10/sh when I closed the last of my shorts at the end of 2021 (~15 months after the publication which was never substantially refuted and never substantially in doubt as far as I could tell).

I would have expected a much quicker and less orderly collapse of share prices and the absence of that made me question my understanding of the stock market entirely, specifically my previous belief that “all public information is quickly priced in.” (That is still not entirely resolved for me.)

Public information is quickly priced in, when it is decided that it is important. For when it's important, the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent, and all that.

I think this is similar to LTCM in the 90s, which reminded people of the depression era quote: “Markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent”

How so? I mean, you can argue that Russia defaulting was (arguably) irrational, but the market response to it was fairly textbook. I might be wrong, but even if they didn't get killed by margin calls, weren't the losses on their bad bets enough to wipe out any profits the company ever made?

“The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.”

Eventually- Markets go back to the mean, but predicting when is the hard part.

“It’s very lonely being the only correct investor on Wall Street”

Part of the story is how passive index ETFs work. https://www.etf.com/stock/NKLA sort by # shares owned, you'll see the biggest owners of NKLA stock are ishares funds, vanguard etc. These funds buy based on market cap of the stock. Anyone with a retirement account that holds passive etfs (or things like target date retirement funds) is a stockholder in NKLA, a stock which no active fund manager would touch with a 10foot pole.

As passive accounts for more than half of the total market funds/flows, blatant frauds that somehow manage to be included in these funds have an easier time surviving (and the larger the market cap, the more inflows their shares receive). In the 2021 stock mania there were other factors at play too.

Are these ETFs, target date retirement funds, etc. protected against class action lawsuits from shareholders who end up holding the bag due to the inclusion of fraudulent stocks like this? Obviously waivers are signed about how performance is never guaranteed, but that's a bit different from a need to timely exit positions in fraudulent companies.

The whole point of passive investing is to not pick winners and losers, to leave that part of the job to professional speculators (including, yes, short sellers). Because you aren't going to do any better than them on average, even if they do on occasion pick some duds (like Nikola).

Imagine you invested in the index minus Nikola. This isn't improbable as several hours of due diligence would have raised concerns.

This shows that the choice of stocks included in an index is not arbitrary. You don't get "better on average" automatically just by buying the 500 stocks on a list someone sold to you.

The share of Nikola in a total-market index fund was so tiny as to be negligble. If one person invested $100K in a total market fund, and another put together thier own "total market minus nikola" fund, even with zero trading fees, the latter might be up maybe $10 or so over the former. After fees and slippage, they're almost certainly behind.

Sure, but I'm talking about when the professionals that you leave it to end up being negligent. Picking a dud occasionally isn't negligent, but I'm wondering if continuing to hold something fraudulent longer than reasonably necessary to ingest damning evidence and dump it might be.

This might be the case if you paid a professional manager to actively manage a portfolio - but not when you are paying the manager to track an index.

SPACs are such an obvious joke on the stock system.

This is quite fascinating. I hope you are able to provide more details on the machinations of these funds. I see the largest allocation is "Direxion Moonshot Innovators ETF" [1], [2].

What money is flowing into this? Why is "Direxion Moonshot Innovators ETF" owned by anyone?

For moments like this, I suspect this fund will liquidate its position? But I'm sure the market for NKLA shares is not that hot...

[1] https://www.etf.com/stock/NKLA [2] https://www.direxion.com/product/moonshot-innovators-etf

>>These funds buy based on market cap of the stock.

> I hope you are able to provide more details on the machinations of these funds.

there are no machinations, it's mechanical, it's betting on expected value while diversifying risk/standard deviation.

Nope - even boring S&P 500 index funds have analysis at their heart. That qualifies those stocks for the S&P 500.

Daily rebalancing is mechanical, and the criteria is coarse- but a decision was made and analysis is done.

And the fund managers do have some small discretion to deviate from the index they track

There is no analysis done to be included in the S&P500. It's 100% rules based. It's extremely unlikely that a stock like NKLA would ever qualify for the S&P500 but it was included in the Russel 2000 (also rules based), and by definition in any total stock market index fund.

Seeing if they follow the rules IS analysis. As is the work of coming up with the rules based on some dataset, which S&P did and does.

Or do you think they yolo’d that criteria out in a vacuum?

It just isn’t micromanaging type analysis. Rather a ‘we think this chunk is worthwhile’ type analysis.

Sure, but in the context of stocks “analysis” typically refers to “fundamental analysis” which means some sort of deep dive into the business model and financial statements of the company… the rules of the S&P are more like “it the market cap above X” and “did it make a profit in the last year”. This is by design as far away from discretionary/traditional “fundamental analysis” as can be.

The caps are set so that the right number of companies fit. Hence ‘500’ in this case. And change to ensure it all works with their goals.

There are many different types of strategies that you’re talking about - momentum, ‘value’, etc. that all set various rules, and are applied in similar ways too.

The analysis I’m talking about isn’t that different, and is still analysis based on fundamentals. It’s just used a bit differently and intentionally trying to be coarse and relatively transparent/mechanical. Private funds keep it opaque and ‘secret sauce’, and have the freedom to do whatever (within the limits of their charter).

Other indexes have more in depth rules that cover exactly the other elements you’re discussing (sector specific indexes, ‘green’ indexes, ‘good governance’ indexes, etc.).

They still use the same analysis tools though.

> Anyone with a retirement account that holds passive etfs

This is incorrect. Not all ETFs. These funds are sector focused (vehicles). A regular S&P500 ETF will not hold NKLA.

I was trying to be brief but you are correct. NKLA was not in the SP500, but it was in the Russel 2000. Also, target retirement date funds will hold total stock market index funds, which will contain NKLA.

Look: https://money.cnn.com/quote/shareholders/shareholders.html?s... Top ten holders are Vanguard, Blackrock, & the other usual providers of index ETFs.

>These funds buy based on market cap of the stock.

There might potentially be a problem if ETFs owned the entire market, but owning half the market cap still allows for market pricing of the other half. I don't see that you are pointing out a problem?

The market put a price on NKLA, and you are simply claiming that you know better than the market (to hell with the wisdom of crowds); such beliefs are generally unfounded. One example does not tell a convincing story, do you have a portfolio of disbelief that you have tracked the performance of?

You don't need to be at the limit case of 100% of the market owned by passive funds to start creating problems [1].

Still, my point was that passive EFTs create a constant bid on company shares, disregarding any fundamentals. The speculative mania of 2021 artificially inflated the market cap of many SPACs like NKLA - speculators have all the rights to do this, but passive ETFs will blindly follow and increase their allocation based on market cap (the effect goes both ways, as price goes down allocation decreases). Who has been buying NKLA shares? Vanguard, for one: look at fund flows since 2021, mostly positive https://etfdb.com/etf/VTI/#fund-flows most of those inflows result in purchases of NKLA shares.

[1] https://www.acheroninsights.com/blog/wbdvi4uarbd3hdssx3f5kaf...

> all public information is quickly priced in

Yeah this theory is bollocks. Priced in by whom, Wall St or Redditors? This theory may have been relevant before retail investors were a large force, but now it's irrelevant. I mean, if it worked, you'd never have meme stocks.

If you look at actual cases of "meme stocks", they happened because the meme factor could actually help the underlying business. GameStop was one famous example of that - if a meme makes the company more popular with the general public, that translates to better forecasts for business outcomes.

Citation needed. If that were the case, meme stocks would have been embraced by Wall St instead of heavily shorted (IIRC BB & B was) because a pump and dump doesn't in fact materially improve the underlying business.

economic and finance theory is based on some clear assumptions. if those assumptions are violated, the theory predicts that the theory cannot predict.

"meme stocks" attract a small amount of capital (, large only) to a small number of stocks whose price becomes inflated. Given the nature of memes, this will rarely happen to the whole market. If you owned a broad index fund, your portfolio would inflate along with the meme stocks, and it will deflate along with them later. If it turned out that GameStop was an actual runaway hit, you would participate in it. If it turned out it was just a fad, you participate in that also. There's no place in this story for broad index funds to be a bad idea. Investing directly in the meme stocks carries a huge amount of diversifiable risk, and the market rewards risk, but not diversifiable risk.

I said "rarely" to the whole market above because one could consider the .com boom a whole market meme. But you would have been worse off if you stayed out of the market through that bubble.

Every theory is based on assumptions. I'm saying the efficient markets hypothesis is less relevant now, not CAPM.

In defence of the efficient market theory, retail investors can be just the wisdom of the crowd. Meme stocks are a rare exception.

That assumes the crowd has wisdom/some information that should be reflected in stock prices, instead of just buying based on FOMO/emotion

> Hindenburg publication

I have not been following the Nikola story, and the fact that the founder has now been convicted of fraud came as news to me. I also was not aware that Hindenburg had published anything on Nikola - reading that now: https://hindenburgresearch.com/nikola/

Interesting -- I made quite a lot on NKLA selling put spreads. It was obvious that they were a fraud. But the market was full of obvious frauds that didn't collapse. GME and AMC had scared the short-sellers out of the market. Idiots were pouring money into NFTs. I just made a bet that NKLA wouldn't fall apart right away, and it paid off very well.

Well, in the end all the short sellers profited hugely from Gamestock, the hodld crowd was left holding the bag. That's what happenes if, as part of a pump and dump, you forget to dump.

> belief that “all public information is quickly priced in.”

if you actually believed that all public information is quickly priced in, why did you short or buy puts? Did you have non-public information? Being bearish is expressing doubt that the information is priced in.

What subsequently happened (nothing) is confirmation that the information was priced in, and should reinforce your stated belief.

Obviously, I believed that there was significant uncertainty around the validity of the Hindenburg information at the moment of its release, but my reading led me to a conclusion that Nikola was very likely not a viable company, likely not a viable company at the then-existing market cap, and that the balance of investor sentiment wasn't likely to tip towards the buy-side.

My surprise wasn't that that it took weeks to sort out (and for Nikola to issue comically terrible responses) but rather that, after making the judgment and investment, that it took well over a year to 75% complete with no credible (to me) positive news from the company.

Differences of opinion about the future are what makes a market. I'm puzzled at who was holding the opposing opinion and why...

> What subsequently happened (nothing)

I invite you to take a look at a 40 month (or just a 5 year) chart of $NKLA and decide if nothing happened to the shares.

Tether is transparently BS, but as long as the consensus is that it’s worth pretending it’s not, it will continue on regardless of the facts.

It’s rabbit holes all the way down.

I have a hard time feeling sorry for the guy. He lied through his teeth and did an old fashion pump and dump.

Worth reading the complaint if you want to hear what he did:

https://www.cohenmilstein.com/wp-content/uploads/site/2022.0...

The "NIKOLA ONE IN MOTION (rolling downhill)" video wasn't mentioned in this complaint, but it seems pretty indicative of the deceptive way this company communicated with the public:

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2020/09/nikola-admits-prototype...

And from the Hindenburg report (https://hindenburgresearch.com/nikola/)

"An investigator sent to the exact site used by Nikola for their video tested the hill in an SUV by parking the vehicle at the top, then rolling from neutral. He was able to hit a top speed of 56 mph and rolled for approximately 2.1 miles."

The pull quote in that article is fantastic.

As part of refuting the Hindenburg claims, Nikola said:

"Nikola never stated its truck was driving under its own propulsion in the video."

"Well technically we said..." is not a disclaimer a company should ever have to use about its own marketing materials.

If ever ‘should’ meant ‘I wish’, it would be here.

Isn't this just "Fake it until you make it"?

I don't personally believe people should do this, but it is a mantra often thrown around.

And it basically is fraud. That fraud is easier to prove if the result is failong and not making it.

I guess so. But I've never thought this was the true spirit of that phrase. To me, fake it till you make it means to pretend you know what you are doing until you do.

The “fake it till you make it” strategy is more about changing your behavior to project confidence when you don’t feel you should have any or the social situation wouldn’t necessarily support it.

This is fundamentally lying to investors when you have a fiduciary responsibility beyond your own enrichment.

This isn’t some suggestion either, but law. Obviously we can debate the effectiveness of the law. But generally you are expected to “be square” in your dealings.

https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/fiduciary-responsibi...

There is solid precedent that it depends on what the definition of ‘is’ is. /s

I take it prosecutors are far more lenient when you're faking a phone UI to always show a full signal or surreptitiously switch to a new phone before the previous one runs out of memory and needs a restart, rather than pretending a 20-ton killing machine can drive itself up a hill.

I think the most important differentiator is who gets fleeced. In the case of the phone, average Joes get stuffed. In Nikola's cases, rich people got stuffed.

That's why this gets prosecuted fairly quickly, while corporations regularly committing fraud against consumers remain in business for decades.

This is also why everyone has heard about Theranos.

Maybe it’s an example of “fake it ‘till you make it” that crossed the line into fraud?

For example, when puffing up one’s CV, one could probably get away with making an actual accomplishment seem more important than it is. However, if they were to make up the accomplishment whole-cloth, the that would cross a line.

If that was the only evidence of fraud then Elon would have huge problems. Does anyone remember the solar city demo?

You have to appreciate the jokes in the complaint:

In short, the VectoIQ Board simply failed to look under the hood at Nikola—both figuratively and literally—completely abdicating their responsibilities to VectoIQ’s stockholders.

I know. Whoever wrote it was someone I’d like to buy a drink for. It’s hilarious.

How much money did he manage to milk from the company? With that light four year prison sentence where he makes nothing, he'll probably still end up making more than us during his work + prison sentence if the penalty phase is just as light.

It was so much that he bought the most expensive real estate in the entire state of Utah. https://www.mansionglobal.com/articles/nikola-motor-chief-se...

"2,670-acre Riverbend Ranch, which includes a 16,800-square-foot mansion along the Weber River"

I wonder if any of the ringleaders of the SPAC boom and bust will ever face charges. Close to a thousand companies took the SPAC route to go public between 2019-2022, with 613 in 2021 alone. As of early 2023 the average returns for SPAC investors are -62% (https://yalejreg.com/bulletin/was-the-spac-crash-predictable...). Meanwhile the financiers and founders/VCs/other insiders made off with billions, all without the pesky SEC getting in the way.

> I wonder if any of the ringleaders of the SPAC boom and bust will ever face charges.

Charges for what? SPACs are essentially a legal (operative word) pump-and-dump. We need legislation to fix this. But a lot of government insiders made off with millions as well, so is there incentive there?

SPACs as a concept may be legal but there's a very large gray area around how individual ones were implemented/sold. There are already dozens of SPAC lawsuits making their way through various courts, and I don't think a larger federal-level investigation by the SEC or DoJ can just be written off as "SPACs are legal". IPOs are legal as well, but if a single investment bank was promising companies that it would use every trick in the book to pump and dump their worthless shares on retail investors, and did so hundreds of times, you can be pretty sure the feds would come down on them hard.

This is the key insight. You don't have to commit a gross violation, like using a patently illegal structure. But if all these SPAC offerings failed in a similar way, with the same parties repeatedly profiting from the same kinds of duff deals, with the same kinds of bag holders being sold the same line, there is a good chance they all skirted the law in similar ways.

What specific charges do you think they are guilty of? Chamath Palihapitiya would be the main culprit of dumping garbage on people that anyone would know of and I can't really find anything he'd be guilty of.

You're allowed to be a cheerleader for your company.

You're allowed to bring a business combination to the market and let people make up their mind if they want to be a part of it or get their money back from the SPAC.

You're allowed to sell your shares when your lock up ends

You're allowed to do this multiple times if people will continue to fund you.

His SPAC companes are a whose who of failed companies.

- Virgin Galactic Holdings

- OpenDoor Technologies

- Clover Health

- SoFi Technologies

and one failed SPAC Social Capital Hedosophia IV

Maybe Chamath would have been better off creating a hedge fund that only went short

I wouldn't call SoFi a failed company (yet). They're still at roughly 10B valuation, same as what they IPOed at. That's actually pretty remarkable in this economy for a company that's still in pre-profit growth mode.

OpenDoor isn't that bad either, they're down 60% from IPO, but a real estate company being able to retain that much value with the massive hike in interest rates also seems pretty good (competitors have done much worse, e.g. Compass and Redfin).

> that's still in pre-profit growth mode.

SoFi started operations in early 2011.

How long are they planning to be in "pre-profit growth mode"?

> You're allowed to be a cheerleader for your company.

You're not really allowed to knowingly cheer for a company you know to be 100% vaporware. That's fraud.

A surprising number of very smart people become incredibly dumb on the stand if/when it blows up. Being too dumb to understand it couldn’t actually work is a defense. Part of why it’s usually so important for them to not have anyone telling them so in writing inside their companies.

Nikola seems to have a working semi now ready for production.

https://youtu.be/LUA7Il252Ng?si=XqpeFw9-qpfPo2Tk

Whoever is dumb enough to invest in a company that hasn’t even bothered to come up with their own company name, but just copied the name of the current most hyped competitor in their category, deserves to lose their money.

Not really disagreeing with your insight, but on the flip side of this, I bought the stock precisely because of the ticker name (when it changed from VTIQ to NKLA) and sold it shortly thereafter for a significant upside.

How does a SPAC become a publicly traded company? What's the process that allows it to become listed on a reputable exchange "without any real assets other than cash"?

Same as every other company, you file some papers with the SEC and make a stock offering

Because they’re very small very simple companies, they’re also much easier than a real company to take public. And by “real” I mean one with products and services and customers and stuff happening.

I laughed so hard reading Hindenburg's report on Nikola. Absolute clown show; still can't believe they rolled that truck down the hill. I made 25 thousand dollars shorting the stock after the report came out.

Good. Straight up lied about an entire company

He just got 4 years. He'll retire rich.

Did he defraud rich/famous people? Seems to be the only way people get in trouble these days.

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