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

cnbc.com

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

#91

Post by rvz »

rwmj wrote: post #40
ffggvv wrote: post #34

now do elon

Are you claiming that Tesla vehicles are fraudulent and only drive when rolling down hills?

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-...

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

#92

Post by kolbe »

dreyfan wrote: post #2

And yet NKLA still has a $5B market cap despite the entire company being 100% fraud. Amazing. [1] https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/nkla

Thank /r/WSB for that. No one can short dog companies anymore for fear of being short squeezed.

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

#93

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o »

snarkypixel wrote: post #35
chasebank wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#95

Post by mikestew »

api wrote: post #79
_game_of_life wrote: post #48

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.c…

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.

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

#96

Post by xyzzy21 »

gpt5 wrote: post #36
chasebank wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#97

Post by hogFeast »

CPLX wrote: post #65
hogFeast wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ri…

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 stor…

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).

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

#98

Post by ajross »

RC_ITR wrote: post #38
ajross wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

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.

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.

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

#99

Post by hogFeast »

andybak wrote: post #47
hogFeast wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ri…

HTZ = Hertz?

Yes...I think it is HTZZ now they are out of bankruptcy.
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