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

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

#331

Post by xkjkls »

djmips wrote: post #326
xkjkls wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#332

Post by fukmbas »

raesene9 wrote: post #19

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 )

Proof that we are in another tech bubble

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

#333

Post by mbesto »

gamblor956 wrote: post #292
mbesto wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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, intr…

> 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...

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

#334

Post by xkjkls »

pvarangot wrote: post #207
chirau wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#335

Post by puchatek »

rvz wrote: post #322
gonehome wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ti…

> 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…

> 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.

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

#336

Post by kikokikokiko »

celticninja wrote: post #209
aiisjustanif wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#337

Post by mbesto »

gscott wrote: post #284
gamblor956 wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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

#338

Post by IanClarke »

haram_masala wrote: post #321
bississippi wrote: post #301

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).

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

#339

Post by ternaryoperator »

tankenmate wrote: post #66
eplanit wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

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.

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

#340

Post by electriclove »

xkjkls wrote: post #327
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.

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.
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