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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

#361

Post by kraig »

xkjkls wrote: post #353
slownews45 wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The SEC did enforce against tesla - when Elon tweeted "Tesla’s stock price is too high imo" - they began an investigation and subpoenaed records because they felt this this had not been approved by attorneys (it wasn't - elon claimed it was his personal opinion). So they went after him for this. They also went after him for a lot of other stuff. Note that they haven't gone after folks for failure to deliver issues on…

> They also went after him for a lot of other stuff. Like lying about a buyout offer for his company. Which he received a incredibly small punishment for.

Call me pessimistic, but my thoughts on the matter is that TSLA and by association Musk have become too big to fail. Anything that would take Musk down would harm a lot of very wealthy investors.

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

#362

Post by habitue »

Pyramus wrote: post #71
jquery wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you just proved his point. NKLA was an outright scam, and Tesla wasn’t, but the way many people talked about Tesla was as if it was a scam selling vapor ware. It took a very keen eye indeed to tease out fact from fiction. Tesla may have “mediocre growth” as you claim (I strongly disagree) but the number of Tesla cars I see on the road are a testament that the company is no scam.

Interested how you define 'scam'. Would you say Wirecard was a scam (their payments network is still in use today), or Enron? My point is that the fact a company is producing a product does not necessarily disqualify them from being a 'scam'.

A scam can't be defined by the mere legal definition of fraud. A true scam is all about the feeling of people on the internet.

Somehow people always forget that.

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

#363

Post by xkjkls »

TheParkShark wrote: post #360
xkjkls wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They also went after him for a lot of other stuff. Like lying about a buyout offer for his company. Which he received a incredibly small punishment for.

Are you sure he was lying?

I mean, similarly to my certainty Donald Trump was lying that his taxes are under audit, and thats why he can't release them. Do I have exact knowledge of Elon's head state, no, but I can make inferences from all his actions since. If a buyer truly existed to facilitate that transaction, that would be public knowledge at this point.

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

#364

Post by misiti3780 »

joering2 wrote: post #278
misiti3780 wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, but regardless I dont see why we call cant agree that for all of the guy's faults, he is done some truly incredible things and he is still pretty young. He is a net positive for the world.

Because of my consulting gigs, I know of at least 3 multimillionaires (>$100MM), who are hoarding air tanks (similar to scuba tanks, but there is already a small company that produces much larger, home-style tanks for this purpose) because someone in Musk circles told them Musk is doing so, so they assume this could be end-of-the-world scenario. Imagine our atmosphere to be like a giant balloon. And SpaceX rockets ar…

I don't understand how this is relevant?

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

#365

Post by zeusk »

fshbbdssbbgdd wrote: post #342
zeusk wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've only ever heard of this in the financial sector (even then, they can create trading plans for trades in future). But yeah sure, I am not a lawyer or a fiduciary and this is not legal or fiduciary financial advise.

My last few big tech employers have had a policy forbidding me from trading in options or derivatives on the stock, as a lowly software engineer.

Care to share? From my knowledge, Google and Microsoft have no such restrictions.

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

#366

Post by gamblor956 »

mbesto wrote: post #333
gamblor956 wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. DuoLi…

You have no idea what you're talking about and clearly have never actually seen financials of a business like DuoLingo.

:) My list of clients when I was still working at a firm include many tech companies ranging in size from vastly unprofitable startups to multi-billion dollar public companies, in industries including robotics, hardware, SaaS, PaaS/IaaS, biotech, media tech, aviation, and clean tech.

A number of YC startups were clients, including some that are still actively discussed on these forums today. At least one of the Groupon, LivingSocial, etc., cohort was a client...

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.

DuoLingo's hosting costs should be low. But content development costs should be included in COGS (being pedantic: COGS doesn't apply to non-inventory business activities, so we should be using the term COR instead). Content development and customer service aren't cheap.

And of course, gross margins are irrelevant if you're constantly blowing past your revenue numbers by overspending on "product development" (i.e., the tech side). History is littered with companies who claimed to have great "gross margins" but died because they overspent on "product development."

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

#367

Post by lovemenot »

kikokikokiko wrote: post #336
celticninja wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It'll get easier the longer it persists. Just be patient.

Heck, Japanese very rarely need a pronoun at all, yet they can somehow infer meaning just fine.

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

#368

Post by slownews45 »

xkjkls wrote: post #353
slownews45 wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The SEC did enforce against tesla - when Elon tweeted "Tesla’s stock price is too high imo" - they began an investigation and subpoenaed records because they felt this this had not been approved by attorneys (it wasn't - elon claimed it was his personal opinion). So they went after him for this. They also went after him for a lot of other stuff. Note that they haven't gone after folks for failure to deliver issues on…

> They also went after him for a lot of other stuff. Like lying about a buyout offer for his company. Which he received a incredibly small punishment for.

As you are probably aware, buyout offers are routinely front run on the street by insiders. Ie, folks in the know get in early and book nice gains. So some folks actually liked hearing direct from CEO on what they were thinking. His twitter post was clear, he was "considering" taking TSLA private.

His blog post on the rationale for his potential move is here: https://www.tesla.com/blog/taking-tesla-private

Anyone who bought in at this news would have been buying in for The problem the SEC has had in trying to charge him is that folks feel like the SEC really ignore some of the clear scam behavior by big players. Fail to deliver? No issue. Broker bad behavior and theft? Light FINRA slaps on the wrist. Complaints about Madoff? Investigate the complainers. CEO talking about potential to take a company private publically - all out WAR by SEC!

He said he is considering something. It was not definite. Stock price didn't jump to the "buyout" price the way it normally would on a real buyout. So we have clear market data that folks didn't not consider his tweets a statement that a buyout was occuring.

Yes - people want to make this into a huge crime. But he explained in his tweets pretty transparently to most what his thinking was.

And they did go after him for this and everything else. Hey says Stock price too high in his opinion - BAM - they were on him. And they went after him for this.

if you read between lines - the contempt court case got a bit of an eye roll from the judge involved.

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

#369

Post by mcot2 »

bell-cot wrote: post #219
mcot2 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the NKLA board members Steve Girsky was previously a Vice Chairmen at GM and likely facilitated this deal. I think it needs to be investigated further and Mary Barra should be forced to provide the evidence of due dilligence that GM collected during the closing of the deal.

What due diligence is reasonably required of GM, if the deal is obviously a win or wash for them, no matter what happens at NKLA?

Because it would be illegal for Girsky to use his influence to have GM say they did due dilligence thus attracting other investors to the slaughterhouse.

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

#370

Post by [deleted] »

skystarman wrote: post #230
_c3bx wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whatever you think of them, the Tesla fanboys have been proven more right then wrong and the likes of Matt Levine (and Bloomberg) are just bitter at this point. A lot of EV startups like NKLA are going to come and go but very few if any will be able to replicate Teslas success in the long term. Retail investors are not always stupid, many of the same Tesla investors have been shorting NKLA since it came on via a spac…

"Whatever you think of them, the Tesla fanboys have been proven more right then wrong" I'm not sure why that's interesting or important. The Tesla fanboys had no special insight into Tesla, Elon or anything. They are part of a cult of personality that bought the marketing hook, line, and sinker. Only about a year ago there were hundreds of Trevor Milton fanboys all over HN, Reddit and elsewhere just sure that Nikola…

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