It's an incredible testament to the distortions of the capital markets that Nikola's current market cap is still $7.84 billion, and not zero. There's nothing that justifies that other than the hope that one will be able to leave others holding the bag.
Theranos at least fell apart once the WSJ put out extremely strong evidence that it was fradulent. The innovative tech that Nikola claimed to have was shown to be fradulent months ago, but they're still worth billions of dollars.
It is because of TSLA, there is a significant number of people who do not understand that the EV industry isn't the same thing as the furniture industry. You can't just spin up a real EV company the way you can spin up a real furniture company. But they don't see it so they want to get in on the ground floor of the next TSLA.
The market can only price accurately if all participants are rational or at the very least are on average rational.
As the effective number of participants falls and the need for those participants to make rational economic decisions falls, were likely to see more weworks, theranos, and nikolas.
Wait until we see someone buy multiple city blocks of Manhattan for conversion into a private yard.
WeWork and Theranos were priced badly in private markets, which is a completely different kind of fraud/misleading than after the IPO, when it's a matter of public communications.
Before IPO, I think almost every fraud is unique, even if they have common themes ... but after IPO I think it's more similar to just hype-man using PR and media to keep retail investors avoiding the reality of the balance sheet.
Almost the entire market is now a scam IMHO. Remember, price is a function of supply and demand. People are blindly putting money in their 401k at a fantastic rate which is higher than the rate they take it out. This is part of why it was so important not to let Covid affect white collar jobs.
Isn't 401k tax-free in the US? At least where I'm from, people put money into these kinds of pension funds since they don't have to pay any tax on the profits, which is usually enough to beat any other low-risk investments.
Traditional 401k is pre-tax going in, taxed coming out (a good deal for most people, who even with savings are likely to be lower tax bracket in retirement than during much of their working career.) Roth 401k is post-tax going in, tax-free coming out (a good deal if you are saving enough to end up in a higher tax bracket in your retirement than most of your working years.)
The beauty of public markets is that you can make a handsome profit if this is your conviction, you put your money where your mouth is and it turns out to be true.
Not really because the IV and presumably cost to borrow NKLA to short it are both high. Essentially that means the market has already priced in that NKLA has a very high risk of failure. But as long as people keep agreeing to buy the stock for a certain value (even if it's a very small group) it won't crash.
At this point you might not be able to short profitably but there was plenty of opportunity even with relatively high borrow costs (~8% currently).
You just need to do it at the right time, before the market prices in the obvious fraud.
I naked shorted Nikola after the ridiculous spike caused by the initial GM deal. I'm already $100k up on that and I predict I'll make even more as the stock price drops.
I also shorted via short term puts a few days ago, when the price spiked a bit on the hopes of new GM deal. I'm betting that the stock price will drop tomorrow due to expiration of a lock up period which will unleash millions of new shares. I'm already up 100% on that and hoping for at least 500% (although if the stock goes up, I might loose 100%; will know by Friday).
What you call "market has already priced in" is people like me, who acted decisively and took the risk. The information was there, I (and people like me) didn't have any secret info. But unlike those other people, we had the courage of conviction and risk tolerance to take on high risk / high reward bet.
NKLA has nothing now, what we're left with is evidence of the new era of 'RobinHood' traders et. al. thinking they're on to something, or not realizing that it's really over, keeping some kind of valuation in place.
We may be in a new era of equities, where the unfortunately under-informed masses are able to really move the needle on a lot of stocks, throwing all sorts of value-trading strategies out the window.
In this kind of market, all you need is a Donald Trumpish like figure and nothing else to keep the fake-valuation going on forever.
Honestly, if Trump were smart he should literally wrap up his businesses in some kind of non-transparent black box, IPO the meta entity right now and get his zillions of 'backers' to hype up is stock perpetually.
Absolutely. I talked to two former GM executives after the original Nikola deal was announced and they couldn't wrap their heads around why GM was involved with Nikola. Both came to the same conclusion, that GM was somehow wrapped up in the same hype that Nikola shareholders were, and I think the scaling back proves they were right.
> We may be in a new era of equities, where the unfortunately under-informed masses are able to really move the needle on a lot of stocks, throwing all sorts of value-trading strategies out the window.
nah, we just need valuations another order of magnitude higher in more companies.
when the market is flooded with money the price of everything goes higher because there is nothing else to buy. that's literally what "inflation linked assets" means. Like most financial terms, it is a euphemism where the financial professional tries to keep a straight face for the longest time.
man, this is what i have been telling myself for the past 3 years. but, here we are, in a pandemic, hitting all time highs. i've decided i'm just going DCA my pile of cash into the market (was saving for real estate deals, but continually get outbid by all cash buyers or people doing reverse exchanges that NEED to close, with the tax savings offsetting the increased prices).
> but, here we are, in a pandemic, hitting all time highs.
what were you telling yourself? Trillions of dollars have been added to the market because Congress told the Central bank and Treasury to do that, and other countries did the same thing too.
An unlimited amount of money is being used to buy a fixed number of [eligible] assets, that is inflation.
That was before the RobinHood trading nation era of hyper speculative investors.
Just like ~15% of the US population believes Trump when totally fabricates facts about the election, he could take a run at perennially duping investors in 2020 and beyond.
"We're about to sign a huge deal for a Moscow property" ... and then it doesn't really happen. "We signed a huge deal with Macau developers" ... but it's not material to the company etc. etc..
There are a lot of people who command a lot of money that love to interact with, 'do deals with' important people, it elevates their status, much in the same way North Korea staged the US/N. Korean talks, ensuring the photo op had 'equal numbers of N. Korean flags to US flags' etc..
Even after all the loses and folly, people find the appearance of power irresistible - and no matter what happens to his business, DJT will forever be a 'Former President' which has formidable status.
The developing worlds has vast sums of money controlled by unsavoury figures without a whole lot of oversight there are innumerable ways to 'pretend to do business' or to 'do it poorly enough' that he can bleed small time investors for a fortune.
While 'Bloomberg' and every other bit of financial press literally spells out the disaster of the numbers, how none of it makes sense, he can literally tell his 'investors' that 'the media is out to get him and that they are lying' etc. etc..
The SEC can't do anything if Trump says 'we signed huge deal' and did actually sign a deal of some kinds, there's plenty of room for hype that's not illegal.
GM was also taken in. Either GM corporate is insanely inept or the scam was at least somewhat credible. I am not judging the retail investors too harshly on this as credible organizations gave it a thumbs up too.
From GM's perspective they stood to lose nothing and potentially gain. It didn't matter if the guy was running a scam, might as well give him a shot in case he pulls it off since the buy in is so low (some tech they didn't care about). Oh "what about their reputation" you say? The only people who will know or care about this already have their driveways filled with Model 3s and 4runners and turn up their nose at GM. The real buyers don't care. The big banks, the suppliers, the big corporate entities GM has to deal with don't care either since this doesn't affect GM's perceived trustworthiness to d business with.
But they still committed engineering and corporate resources, even if just to do planning and run estimates. I get that it is not a lot in the grand scheme of things for them, but it went quite far if the scam was so obvious.
Or can I get a meeting with GM with an animator and mockups?
Nikola is still worth $10B on the market, after today's crash. GM got an 11% stake. i.e they just made $1B, atleast. Probably much more. Yes that's worth a couple of pointless meetings and work for GM.
No, GM called off the deal, even if they got some amount, they'd never be able to liquidate, the selloff would crash NKLA instantly. It's going to go down eventually.
I don't think HNers here are grasping how bad it is for a respectable multinational like GM to get taken in a major deal like this, it's bad.
"From GM's perspective they stood to lose nothing and potentially gain. "
No, investing 2 Billion in a scam essentially ruins the credibility of many people and puts the CEO in jeopardy.
Being stupid has consequences, even if you can back out.
"The big banks, the suppliers, the big corporate entities GM has to deal with don't care "
Of course they care - you think that the suppliers of GM who give GM massive credit want to know that the company is doing something this dumb and could end up in Chapter 11 - again - where they lose their money?
There is no positive spin on this for GM it makes them look like idiots - to the point wherein the CEO should definitely be fired because this is not just 'some deal' it's an existential issue concerning their future.
I understand the structure of the deal - you're not understanding credibility, power and money.
Doing a $2B deal with a company that turned out to be hot air / fraud is inexcusable, total incompetence - it doesn't matter how well leveraged GM was ostensibly, or how de-risked they were.
If it was a 'side show' M&A project, the CEO could write it off, but it's not - EV's are 'the core' part of the future of automakers and they are scrambling to put a strategy in place.
Everyone involved in this fiasco to go, they need someone in place who can put the EV roadmap in place.
There was ample evidence that NKLA was a mess, and GM bit anyhow.
This deal should be a be 'Tesla Buy' signal, because it validates Musks' view that regular automakers are stupid.
And just gasp at how badly markets are out of whack - a $10B company that has no money, a string of failures, they've produced nothing for the investment, shenanigans with investors bailing out etc..
In reality NKLA is probably worth some large negative value.
I know we aren't supposed to judge a book my its cover and I can't even put my finger on exactly why I feel this way, but simply naming your company Nikola when your biggest competitor is Tesla has always seemed like a huge red flag to me.
That's what others would consider a healthy amount of competitiveness when you literally run against one of the most innovative companies of all time. What a luxury to witness this narrative unfolding in real time.
You feel that way because you realize that it's a calculated attempt to ride the coattails of an infinitely more successful and reputable company, a deliberate confusion, like if you opened a coffee chain named 'Farbucks' (slogan: "We'll make your dollar go further!"), or the small pennystocks which aim for stock tickers deliberately similar to real companies (Matt Levine covers the occasional bumps in the stocks of 'accidentally' similar stock tickers).
Is there official word on that being the reason for the name? That is certainly one of the theories I had and it shows a lack of ethics. However it isn't the only theory I had and they all looked bad.
For example, maybe they weren't being sleazy and they thought this was a clever play off Tesla. It isn't clever. It is unprofessional. It also shows a lack of clear vision in that they are fundamentally defining a company based off being an alternative to competitor. This shows a lack of leadership.
Or maybe they are even stupider than we gave them credit for. They saw the company was named Tesla and assumed Nikola Tesla had a direct hand in designing electric cars and were too lazy to look up the rather tangential connection between the man and the company. This shows a lack of knowledge or desire for knowledge.
I couldn't think of any positive reason for the name.
I think it follows a general theme where some people have a "tricks"-based mindset. Some people look at Tesla and think it's just tricks. Such as the idea that people are buying Teslas because of the drivetrain - which would be a simple trick, rather than the reality that Teslas are just all-around great cars - something much harder to understand.
The Nikola founder probably thought Musk had succeeded in unlocking a series of successful tricks, and set out to reproduce them. But when you don't know the reason for the formula, you don't know what steps you can leave in or out, so you just follow it mechanically.
I don’t think so. Nobody knows the word Nikola. That reference is pretty subtle. It’s Tesla Motors, Inc. that tried to ride the coattails of the famous inventor.
There were Jan 20, 2023 puts on this guy. And there still are. The problem here is that I don't actually know anything about NKLA or the business they're in.
If you think they'll go under in the next two years, you could make bank on just debit spreads. And if you think they're a shite company but don't know where they're gonna go, do you really know anything?
I'm not sure, just because I think something is intrinsically worthless doesn't mean there won't be other people who still think the stock has value in 2 years.
I think it's a malinvestment unless you are reasonably certain there will be a drop soonish but want to hedge that bet with something long-dated.
Anyway, I was simply responding to your statement that you could make bank on it, which I highly disagree with. So much uncertainty is already priced in that the max upside is only 3x even if the company becomes completely worthless in the next 2 years.
Right, but that's where it comes in that you have better knowledge than the aggregate of the market. Whether or not it's bank is how much the gain is. Whether or not it's worth the risk is separate.
A quick test for the certainty a lot of people are expressing here on the company's worthlessness is how much they're willing to bet on making that real.
And I agree with you, I wouldn't make the trade. But that's all because I can't predict it.
Surely that's the most unsurprising thing in the world. I doubt there is a set of things that all currently alive people in the world find "surest, quickest, and most fulfilling".
And I'll set aside the fact that $30k in the Bay isn't rich in any form.
Well, no company is 'worth' its market cap since you can rarely exchange it for that value in total. But of course the only meaningful notion of absolute 'worth' of something like this is the value as determined by the market. Of course it may not have been worth it to you at the marginal clearing price, but that's because the value to you is a function of the valuer and the thing being valued.
If a guy is selling sandwiches on the street for $1 million and a hungry Jeff Bezos happens to wander by and purchase one, the sandwiches still aren't worth $1 million.
Well, that's because 'worth' is ill-defined on its own. The 'worth' of that sandwich could be any of "last clearing price", "current ask", "current bid", or any other metric you choose.
So the sandwich isn't worth a million but it isn't worth any sum because 'worth' isn't a concept on its own.
Trevor Milton invited me to his headquarters to prove his trucks weren't fake. While we were having lunch I asked him about the longtime friend of his (15 years, went to his wedding) who he had framed for extortion. The friend later committed suicide when he got out of jail. This was all happening during the Nikola reverse-IPO process.
After a recording of our conversation was posted online, a bunch of women came forward with accusations against Trevor Milton. That and the Hindenburg report are why GM can't do this deal anymore.
They weren't investing anything. They were getting the equity for free essentially, just to let them use the GM hydrogen tech that GM was planning to throw away anyway. So why would GM back out of a deal that was so sweet for them? It was really that bad.
Considering it wasn't a telephone call and was possibly in a common space (restaurant, lunch room, etc), this type of recording might not need two party consent in the handful of states that are not one party consent states: https://www.wallsheinlaw.com/articles/the-two-party-consent-...
This isn’t a defense against harassment, defamation, or any of the other charges that may apply including wiretapping (of which you list a possible defense). Listen to a lawyer not people on the internet, including me, when it comes to legal advice
When we arrived at Nikola headquarters, we were told we could record everything. The idea was to get the word out on social media that the company wasn't a fraud.
Just curious because I would like to learn a different perspective, why would it matter? I could see maybe for a trial but here, on the internet, what is the issue?
Some states are what is known as "all party consent" states, while others are "one party consent" states.
In all party consent states, it is illegal to record a private conversation unless everyone who is being recorded is aware and has consented to being recorded. In one party consent states (which are the majority of states), only one person (presumably the person doing the recording) needs to be aware of and consent to the recording.
That difference can obviously make a huge impact on the legal ramifications of recording. For example, during the Monica Lewinsky/Bill Clinton affair, the only person actually indicted for a crime (later dropped) was Linda Tripp, who was brought up on wiretapping charges for surreptitiously recording Lewinsky. This only happened because Maryland is an all party consent state.
This is also why customer service calls start with "This call may be recorded for quality purposes..." - it's to inform you that the call is being recorded if you happen to live in an all party consent state.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply that what you did was surreptitious. I meant, if other people have that idea before understanding the laws around recording conversations.
The comment I was replying to seemed to interpret this as an "admissibility of evidence" issue. My point was that it has nothing to do with "admissibility", just that the GP comment was pointing out that if the person recorded this without the consent of all parties (which turned out not to be the case, but regardless) they could potentially be putting themselves in serious legal jeopardy.
Trevor told Jonny Robb to stop posting about his behavior towards women, and in exchange he would give him $500,000. He told Jonny to come and collect $50,000, and that $50,000 would be paid in successive increments as long as he continued not to post. When Jonny arrived to meet Trevor he found that Trevor was with the police and it was a sting operation. He was arrested for extortion and possession of a controlled substance (weed + mushrooms in his car). When he was released from jail he took his own life. It's not 100% certain that Trevor first brought up the idea of a payment to keep him quiet, but that is my belief after talking to Jonny's family and friends as well as listening to Trevor's story in person.
because Trevor told the police that Jonny had told him "give me money or i'm going to post untrue information about you to ruin your reputation". The info turned out to be true, which makes me doubt him recounting that Jonny brought up the idea of a pay off.
So Trevor fabricated evidence to fool the police? That's a far more serious offense than the sexual misconduct, and frankly it's hard to believe he could pull that off, unless he managed to bribe the police. Johnny's probably not completely innocent - they can both be scumbags.
when you're a billionaire you have certain influence, and people have told me that LDS members tend to look out for their own. Trevor made a large donation to the people that helped with the arrest after. I can't remember if it was the police or the attorney or both.
As a rule, coercion by offering money will never qualify as entrapment. The courts consider refusing money to be “too easy”, so to speak. An example of entrapment would instead be a threat of prosecution against your child unless you do some illegal act, or something else with a similarly more nefarious coercive force.
Well, they're activist short sellers. So in the worst case they're destroying capitalism by crafting and broadcasting carefully designed payloads of viral misinformation to portray the efforts of innocent companies in the worst possible light, in order to influence market opinion and drive down the share price to profit from short positions. In the best case, they're aiming to profit from short positions by doing the hard investigative work of discovering fraud, helping the market more efficiently arrive at fair prices for fraudulent or otherwise over-valued stocks, and helping unsuspecting investors avoid ruining their plans to retire by trading hard-earn cash for worthless stock based on lies from company management / stock promoters.
I know it's petty but literally the fact that it was named Nikola was reason enough for anyone to think they're shady or uninspired or a straight up scam. I would be equally skeptical about wannabe Apple competitors named Banana or Dragonfruit, or a Microsoft competitor named Megahard, or a Burger King competitor named Hamburger Aristocrat. If the best someone can come up with for their own name is a joke pointed at their primary competitor, it does not inspire confidence.
Well, he didn't. Tesla was named 'Tesla' by the founders, not Musk. And Tesla the man was more obscure back then than he is now (and that's in large part thanks to Tesla the company plus various pop culture ephemera like a certain webcomic).
I've been too afraid to short this stock - especially since it seems like all the information I know about it (Hindenburg report, few YouTube summaries of the situation) is public knowledge. I naively figured that information was priced in - yet, as recently as Friday this stock was trading at 28 dollars a share.
Following Nikola has really made doubt the capabilities of the stock market. It might be dangerous for me, I might begin to think a bit of reading and casual YouTube watching might make me informed enough to take meaningful positions. On the other hand, maybe it is...
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[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 174 ms ] threadIf anybody wants a very entertaining synopsis of what transpired.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/hertz-stock-sec-1.5616307
The market can only price accurately if all participants are rational or at the very least are on average rational.
As the effective number of participants falls and the need for those participants to make rational economic decisions falls, were likely to see more weworks, theranos, and nikolas.
Wait until we see someone buy multiple city blocks of Manhattan for conversion into a private yard.
Before IPO, I think almost every fraud is unique, even if they have common themes ... but after IPO I think it's more similar to just hype-man using PR and media to keep retail investors avoiding the reality of the balance sheet.
I'm surprised property taxes never caught up with that mansion!?
OTOH you couldn't pay me to spend a night in the same room with that creepy doll !
Traditional 401k is pre-tax going in, taxed coming out (a good deal for most people, who even with savings are likely to be lower tax bracket in retirement than during much of their working career.) Roth 401k is post-tax going in, tax-free coming out (a good deal if you are saving enough to end up in a higher tax bracket in your retirement than most of your working years.)
You just need to do it at the right time, before the market prices in the obvious fraud.
I naked shorted Nikola after the ridiculous spike caused by the initial GM deal. I'm already $100k up on that and I predict I'll make even more as the stock price drops.
I also shorted via short term puts a few days ago, when the price spiked a bit on the hopes of new GM deal. I'm betting that the stock price will drop tomorrow due to expiration of a lock up period which will unleash millions of new shares. I'm already up 100% on that and hoping for at least 500% (although if the stock goes up, I might loose 100%; will know by Friday).
What you call "market has already priced in" is people like me, who acted decisively and took the risk. The information was there, I (and people like me) didn't have any secret info. But unlike those other people, we had the courage of conviction and risk tolerance to take on high risk / high reward bet.
Yes, but it'll get there yet.
We may be in a new era of equities, where the unfortunately under-informed masses are able to really move the needle on a lot of stocks, throwing all sorts of value-trading strategies out the window.
In this kind of market, all you need is a Donald Trumpish like figure and nothing else to keep the fake-valuation going on forever.
Honestly, if Trump were smart he should literally wrap up his businesses in some kind of non-transparent black box, IPO the meta entity right now and get his zillions of 'backers' to hype up is stock perpetually.
Or due diligence? This is GM's fault really not Nikola (the latter was simply selling snaked oil).
nah, we just need valuations another order of magnitude higher in more companies.
when the market is flooded with money the price of everything goes higher because there is nothing else to buy. that's literally what "inflation linked assets" means. Like most financial terms, it is a euphemism where the financial professional tries to keep a straight face for the longest time.
what were you telling yourself? Trillions of dollars have been added to the market because Congress told the Central bank and Treasury to do that, and other countries did the same thing too.
An unlimited amount of money is being used to buy a fixed number of [eligible] assets, that is inflation.
Literally, if you watch his interview about the DJT ticker, you see him praising everything and blaming others when it went bankrupt.
Just like ~15% of the US population believes Trump when totally fabricates facts about the election, he could take a run at perennially duping investors in 2020 and beyond.
"We're about to sign a huge deal for a Moscow property" ... and then it doesn't really happen. "We signed a huge deal with Macau developers" ... but it's not material to the company etc. etc..
There are a lot of people who command a lot of money that love to interact with, 'do deals with' important people, it elevates their status, much in the same way North Korea staged the US/N. Korean talks, ensuring the photo op had 'equal numbers of N. Korean flags to US flags' etc..
Even after all the loses and folly, people find the appearance of power irresistible - and no matter what happens to his business, DJT will forever be a 'Former President' which has formidable status.
The developing worlds has vast sums of money controlled by unsavoury figures without a whole lot of oversight there are innumerable ways to 'pretend to do business' or to 'do it poorly enough' that he can bleed small time investors for a fortune.
While 'Bloomberg' and every other bit of financial press literally spells out the disaster of the numbers, how none of it makes sense, he can literally tell his 'investors' that 'the media is out to get him and that they are lying' etc. etc..
I think it's significantly higher than 15%.
Or can I get a meeting with GM with an animator and mockups?
Yes, that and a $34b market cap.
I don't think HNers here are grasping how bad it is for a respectable multinational like GM to get taken in a major deal like this, it's bad.
No, investing 2 Billion in a scam essentially ruins the credibility of many people and puts the CEO in jeopardy.
Being stupid has consequences, even if you can back out.
"The big banks, the suppliers, the big corporate entities GM has to deal with don't care "
Of course they care - you think that the suppliers of GM who give GM massive credit want to know that the company is doing something this dumb and could end up in Chapter 11 - again - where they lose their money?
There is no positive spin on this for GM it makes them look like idiots - to the point wherein the CEO should definitely be fired because this is not just 'some deal' it's an existential issue concerning their future.
Doing a $2B deal with a company that turned out to be hot air / fraud is inexcusable, total incompetence - it doesn't matter how well leveraged GM was ostensibly, or how de-risked they were.
If it was a 'side show' M&A project, the CEO could write it off, but it's not - EV's are 'the core' part of the future of automakers and they are scrambling to put a strategy in place.
Everyone involved in this fiasco to go, they need someone in place who can put the EV roadmap in place.
There was ample evidence that NKLA was a mess, and GM bit anyhow.
This deal should be a be 'Tesla Buy' signal, because it validates Musks' view that regular automakers are stupid.
And just gasp at how badly markets are out of whack - a $10B company that has no money, a string of failures, they've produced nothing for the investment, shenanigans with investors bailing out etc..
In reality NKLA is probably worth some large negative value.
Seriously though, GM does make plenty of electric cars. Or are you suggesting they should use the Edison brand?
http://www.american-automobiles.com/images2/1914-General-Ele...
For example, maybe they weren't being sleazy and they thought this was a clever play off Tesla. It isn't clever. It is unprofessional. It also shows a lack of clear vision in that they are fundamentally defining a company based off being an alternative to competitor. This shows a lack of leadership.
Or maybe they are even stupider than we gave them credit for. They saw the company was named Tesla and assumed Nikola Tesla had a direct hand in designing electric cars and were too lazy to look up the rather tangential connection between the man and the company. This shows a lack of knowledge or desire for knowledge.
I couldn't think of any positive reason for the name.
The Nikola founder probably thought Musk had succeeded in unlocking a series of successful tricks, and set out to reproduce them. But when you don't know the reason for the formula, you don't know what steps you can leave in or out, so you just follow it mechanically.
It’s one thing to name your company after an inventor, and another to name it after an infinitely more successful competitor.
Nice try.
I haven't logged in in years, but this was so well done.
If you think they'll go under in the next two years, you could make bank on just debit spreads. And if you think they're a shite company but don't know where they're gonna go, do you really know anything?
I think it's a malinvestment unless you are reasonably certain there will be a drop soonish but want to hedge that bet with something long-dated.
Anyway, I was simply responding to your statement that you could make bank on it, which I highly disagree with. So much uncertainty is already priced in that the max upside is only 3x even if the company becomes completely worthless in the next 2 years.
A quick test for the certainty a lot of people are expressing here on the company's worthlessness is how much they're willing to bet on making that real.
And I agree with you, I wouldn't make the trade. But that's all because I can't predict it.
And I'll set aside the fact that $30k in the Bay isn't rich in any form.
So the sandwich isn't worth a million but it isn't worth any sum because 'worth' isn't a concept on its own.
After a recording of our conversation was posted online, a bunch of women came forward with accusations against Trevor Milton. That and the Hindenburg report are why GM can't do this deal anymore.
They weren't investing anything. They were getting the equity for free essentially, just to let them use the GM hydrogen tech that GM was planning to throw away anyway. So why would GM back out of a deal that was so sweet for them? It was really that bad.
https://heyamifat.com/robb.mp4
In all party consent states, it is illegal to record a private conversation unless everyone who is being recorded is aware and has consented to being recorded. In one party consent states (which are the majority of states), only one person (presumably the person doing the recording) needs to be aware of and consent to the recording.
That difference can obviously make a huge impact on the legal ramifications of recording. For example, during the Monica Lewinsky/Bill Clinton affair, the only person actually indicted for a crime (later dropped) was Linda Tripp, who was brought up on wiretapping charges for surreptitiously recording Lewinsky. This only happened because Maryland is an all party consent state.
This is also why customer service calls start with "This call may be recorded for quality purposes..." - it's to inform you that the call is being recorded if you happen to live in an all party consent state.
Why would we on HN, care about whether or not the recording was legal?
Additionally, people might want to copy this person's behavior, and it would be useful to know whether the behavior is legal or not before doing so.
IANAL, but how is that not entrapment? Or even if it wasn't entrapment, how is it different than signing a NDA/non-disparagement contract?
>possession of a controlled substance (weed + mushrooms in his car)
okay that's just dumb.
Because in all your comments you talk about a lot of stuff with little proof...
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/29/two-women-file-sexual-abuse-...
Is their company dedicated to watching/causing others to go up in flames?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_Foods_Market
Following Nikola has really made doubt the capabilities of the stock market. It might be dangerous for me, I might begin to think a bit of reading and casual YouTube watching might make me informed enough to take meaningful positions. On the other hand, maybe it is...