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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

#391

Post by lazide »

mcot2 wrote: post #374
lazide wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some analysis that they knew how scammy it was and proceeded because of an analysis it was worth it in other ways? If all there is, is a memo saying ‘just buy it, and don’t look too hard’, or it looks like they fell for an obvious scam, then the execs can be on the hook for negligence to the shareholders

I think its more sinister then that unfortunatly. The GM deal was concocted to give almost zero risk to GM but crucially it was intended to give new investors confidence that a major player looked at NKLA and did due diligence.

Sounds like tons of billable hours to me while every email and correspondence is pored over to see if it is a giant conspiracy and who knew what, and when, etc.

I can feel the lawyers yachts being built.

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

#392

Post by bell-cot »

lazide wrote: post #313
bell-cot wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Some analysis that they knew how scammy it was and proceeded because of an analysis it was worth it in other ways? If all there is, is a memo saying ‘just buy it, and don’t look too hard’, or it looks like they fell for an obvious scam, then the execs can be on the hook for negligence to the shareholders

I get the sense that you (& many others) believe that GM should have acted as a regulated bank ("know your customer" rules), as a regulated securities rating firm, and/or as an authoritative moral inquisitor & judge with regard to NKLA.

GM is none of those. (And they were not proposing to acquire NKLA, for "due diligence" to apply for that reason.) They are a car company. Their execs' duty to GM shareholders is to not stupidly squander GM's money. The contract was a "win or wash" situation for GM - so that duty was fulfilled. They don't have to even do - let alone produce - a written analysis. The same goes for GM's contracts with the supplies of tires, floor mats, wiper blades, etc. for the cars they assemble.

Certainly one can accuse GM of acting rather uncaring and sleazy with regard to NKLA. Nothing special about that - most older people (at least from parts of the U.S. where the auto industry is concentrated) could tell you that all of the big auto makers got over their "Don't Be Evil" idealism many, many decades ago now.

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

#393

Post by javierluraschi »

belter wrote: post #378
jdminhbg wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure creating a multibillion dollar vaporware fraud shell company and being a dick on Twitter are comparable sins.

Lets see some of the quotes and think if we could get away with it... Aug 7, 2018 "Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured." Elon Musk Aug 7, 2018 "Shareholders could either to sell at 420 or hold shares & go private" After paying 20 million dollar fine referring to the Securities and Exchange Commission tweets: "Just want to that the Shortseller Enrichment Commission is doing incredible work," "…

What's wrong with the latest statement?

Technically all cars have a proper GPU (Tesla's "GPU") and 360 cameras, the reliability is probably in the 90%-99% (which, yes, is pretty terrible to be considered fully autonomous, but impressive from a technical standpoint). Technically is correct to say that all they have to do is to "improve the software". That will be a lot of work, sweat and tears, but still correct.

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

#394

Post by Dylan16807 »

itsoktocry wrote: post #355
borkyborkbork wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to be a troll if you are trying to convince people that a self propulsive vehicle, and an unpowered structure that can only move by being pushed or rolling down a hill are the same thing.

If you think the lawsuit is merely about rolling the truck down the hill, as opposed to lying to investors about their current tech, I'm not sure what to tell you. There is zero evidence Tesla has a semitruck that with the range the claim at the price they claim to be able to produce it.

They can get range with enough batteries.

So at most the price is wrong. That's nothing compared to offering a completely fake product.

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

#395

Post by lazide »

bell-cot wrote: post #392
lazide wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some analysis that they knew how scammy it was and proceeded because of an analysis it was worth it in other ways? If all there is, is a memo saying ‘just buy it, and don’t look too hard’, or it looks like they fell for an obvious scam, then the execs can be on the hook for negligence to the shareholders

I get the sense that you (& many others) believe that GM should have acted as a regulated bank ("know your customer" rules), as a regulated securities rating firm, and/or as an authoritative moral inquisitor & judge with regard to NKLA. GM is none of those. (And they were not proposing to acquire NKLA, for "due diligence" to apply for that reason.) They are a car company. Their execs' duty to GM shareholders is to no…

They have a duty to they shareholders to not squander money, correct? That is what I was addressing.

Also, individually they have duties to not commit crimes (like conspiracy to defraud, or whatever).

If there is evidence they conspired with someone to commit securities fraud, even if it had nothing to do with GM, then regardless of their duties to GM, then they can go to jail for that.

If they knowingly were irresponsible/negligent as officers of the company in how they approved deals, they could be fired or sued, depending on how blatant it is.

Since it didn’t seem to hurt GM’s bottom line, seems like the latter is unlikely.

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

#396

Post by ac29 »

javierluraschi wrote: post #393
belter wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lets see some of the quotes and think if we could get away with it... Aug 7, 2018 "Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured." Elon Musk Aug 7, 2018 "Shareholders could either to sell at 420 or hold shares & go private" After paying 20 million dollar fine referring to the Securities and Exchange Commission tweets: "Just want to that the Shortseller Enrichment Commission is doing incredible work," "…

What's wrong with the latest statement? Technically all cars have a proper GPU (Tesla's "GPU") and 360 cameras, the reliability is probably in the 90%-99% (which, yes, is pretty terrible to be considered fully autonomous, but impressive from a technical standpoint). Technically is correct to say that all they have to do is to "improve the software". That will be a lot of work, sweat and tears, but still correct.

Until it actually works, how can you say the hardware is sufficient?

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

#397

Post by godelski »

javierluraschi wrote: post #393
belter wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lets see some of the quotes and think if we could get away with it... Aug 7, 2018 "Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured." Elon Musk Aug 7, 2018 "Shareholders could either to sell at 420 or hold shares & go private" After paying 20 million dollar fine referring to the Securities and Exchange Commission tweets: "Just want to that the Shortseller Enrichment Commission is doing incredible work," "…

What's wrong with the latest statement? Technically all cars have a proper GPU (Tesla's "GPU") and 360 cameras, the reliability is probably in the 90%-99% (which, yes, is pretty terrible to be considered fully autonomous, but impressive from a technical standpoint). Technically is correct to say that all they have to do is to "improve the software". That will be a lot of work, sweat and tears, but still correct.

Because the claim can't be backed by evidence. There's still a camera alone vs camera +lidar debate. But besides that it's not hard to imagine that the neural net needed to process whatever vision you need isn't powerful enough, so you need next generation GPUs/TPUs/whatever-Us. We just don't know until it's been done. But we know that the more frames you can process per second the better. We do know that the more resolution an image has the more information it has and the higher potential accuracy a network has (if you're following ViTs you'll notice people are upping the image resolution and getting better classification results).

So it's a bold claim given what we know. It's also clear that next generation hardware will be safer regardless of if the previous generation "works."

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

#398

Post by rhizome »

gonehome wrote: post #379
BlissWaves wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am dumbfounded how you don't find it bothersome to call it Full-Self Driving today when they are not even remotely close to creating FSD. FDS is beyond a difficult problem. The margin of error so low that you simply don't get there by tweaking some settings.

They're not just 'tweaking some settings': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6bOwQdCJrc What they have today isn't FSD (which they state explicitly), but I'm happy to give them extra money early given the work they're doing on the chance that it works in the future. I think they have the best chance of success of actually shipping something real.

>I'm happy to give them extra money early given the work they're doing on the chance that it works in the future.

You're a good mark, FSD is a mug's game.

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

#399

Post by hsod »

gamblor956 wrote: post #366
mbesto wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I’m not an accountant but the idea that content development should be counted in COGS seems way wrong to me. The whole point of COGS is that it should be subtracted from revenue since you have to pay it for every unit sold. Duolingo’s content isn’t like that— once they build out a lesson it can be served for free to any number of customers. Saying it should be counted as COGS because it’s expensive is to erase the whole idea behind COGS.

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

#400

Post by makeitdouble »

jdminhbg wrote: post #297
anyfactor wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I browse through a lot of niche investing social media groups. One of the more liked posts on a Nikola investment group was, "If "they" cared about the future, the earth and the renewable energy issue, they would let whatever Trevor did slide." Surprisingly, I saw similar posts about Musk on the Thailand rescuer tweet and the price too high tweet. You are not betting against the fundamentals or the realities of the s…

I'm not sure creating a multibillion dollar vaporware fraud shell company and being a dick on Twitter are comparable sins.

From my point of view as a peasant without any shares anywhere, multibillion dollar vaporware companies have very little impact. We could argue this investment could have gone into better companies who could have made the world a better place, but it's purely hypothetical (the money could have gone to a worse company, or political lobbying as well...). Basically, from afar, it's a "rich people lost some money" drama.
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