Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

cnbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 533 posts

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

#111

Post by babesh »

chasebank wrote: post #30
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

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 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.

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

#112

Post by cma »

ajross wrote: post #27
typon wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

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.

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

#113

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o »

lvl100 wrote: post #104

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.

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

#114

Post by hef19898 »

hogFeast wrote: post #43
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.

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…

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.

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

#115

Post by misiti3780 »

sixQuarks wrote: post #89
misiti3780 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#116

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

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?

> 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”.

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

#117

Post by majormajor »

twelve40 wrote: post #106
mikestew wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#118

Post by Aperocky »

sidcool wrote: post #103

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).

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

#119

Post by H8crilA »

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?

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.

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

#120

Post by cma »

marvin wrote: post #61
RC_ITR wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.
Post reply on HN