Grand jury indicts Trevor Milton, Nikola founder, on three counts of fraud • Hacker News Board

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

#241

Post by jjoonathan » Thu, Jul 29, 2021, 6:18 PM UTC

ethbr0 wrote: post #84

zippergz wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

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

#242

Post by qeternity » Thu, Jul 29, 2021, 6:18 PM UTC

yashap wrote: post #39

Invictus0 wrote: post #14

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…

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 comm…

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.

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

#243

Post by hogFeast » Thu, Jul 29, 2021, 6:21 PM UTC

hef19898 wrote: post #114

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…

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.

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).

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

#244

Post by qeternity » Thu, Jul 29, 2021, 6:21 PM UTC

vmception wrote: post #12

> 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.

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

#245

Post by gonehome » Thu, Jul 29, 2021, 6:22 PM UTC

zeusk wrote: post #240

gonehome wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#246

Post by vmception » Thu, Jul 29, 2021, 6:23 PM UTC

yashap wrote: post #39

Invictus0 wrote: post #14

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…

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 comm…

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

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

#247

Post by ibarea23 » Thu, Jul 29, 2021, 6:24 PM UTC

pvarangot wrote: post #204

yup00 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

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 marke…

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.

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

#248

Post by azinman2 » Thu, Jul 29, 2021, 6:27 PM UTC

lotsofpulp wrote: post #233

bagels wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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.

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

#249

Post by qeternity » Thu, Jul 29, 2021, 6:32 PM UTC

TameAntelope wrote: post #206

runbathtime wrote: post #168

How do they define fraud? Lying? Isn't every company doing this?

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 ind…

> 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.

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

#250

Post by azinman2 » Thu, Jul 29, 2021, 6:34 PM UTC

shawnz wrote: post #183

chasebank wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 marke…

A $5 burger would be super cheap in SF, difficult to find, and unlikely one worth eating.