I think the new Theranos by @rohangilkes

Rohan
4 minutes, 13 seconds read

I think the new Theranos is here >>> Nikola.

Hit $25 billion marketshare

CEO resigns and goes dark on Twitter this morning

Net worth of $2.7 billion as of today, and the company hasn’t had a single dollar of revenue.

Lawd, a thread ??

Man I don’t even know what tone to take with this thread because a lot of people on Robinhood got smashed this morning.

It’s a company I had been looking at but it never passed even a cursory look….

Yet they were out here flourishing as of 2 weeks ago…

A lot of this is distilled from the brilliant work of @HindenburgRes , for a deeper dive go here:

https://t.co/LhEobyXgxL

Here’s a quick Twitter friendly summary of what happened…

https://hindenburgresearch.com/nikola/

So back in 2016, Nikola was set to reveal what they said was going to be a fully functioning truck that changes the game forever…

Sweet, the event came and it looked amazing and during the event it was again proclaimed to be fully functional…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbXqiSYDhrA&feature=youtu.be

This reported at Bloomberg wasn’t having it…

I guess no biggie on its own, it wouldn’t be the first time someone went to an automotive show and saw cars/trucks that weren’t fully operational.

CEO comes out swinging…

BTW the truck was supposed to be zero emission hydrogen electric, but turns out that this was allegedly just a stencil they added, and allegedly the technology didn’t exist. (Not trying to get sued)

Truck doesn’t work.
Technology doesn’t work.
Soon to be a recurring pattern…

And because not much worked on the truck (allegedly), the whole thing was plugged in by a cable below the stage…

Fast forward 2 years, in order to show things were still coming along nicely, Nikola posted a video of the truck “in motion”

Video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAToxJ9CGb8&feature=youtu.be

Turns out the video was just them finding a hill that looked flat and rolling the truck down the hill and filming from an angle so it looked legit…

(Allegedly)

Soon after the video was played for the Governor of Arizona as they announced bringing manufacturing to the state…

Oh word?

Then they were like, and I paraphrase, “we have solar panels on the roof creating mad energy every day, our innovation is top level”.

When folks checked the roof, no solar on the roof, and no horses out back…

Now we’re at November last year…the company was like, “we have some game-changing battery technology, diesel trucks are obsolete, you could as well stop producing diesel trucks immediately!

If you guessed that this ^ didn’t exist either, you’re catching on!!!

But more wild stuff to come…

After all of this, in June of this year they went public. $NKLA baby…and whew.

So next big thing. Hydrogen production.

You need cheap hydrogen to sell hydrogen trucks right?

Nikola: We got this.

Narrator: They did not in fact have this.

Their head of hydrogen production? Probably the most critical role in the company with their new direction…

The CEO’s little brother.

His expertise: Driveway paving in Hawaii.

Good quality driveway/construction work it seems, but not sure it was the right person for the highly scientific and engineering-intensive pursuit of hydrogen production…

Little brother, plus other family members and first few employees now have stock valued at over $100 million.

CEO just resigned and super early this morning he went private on social media (I know cause I was up at 2 am reading some of this tweets and his account was still up)

And here’s the stock this morning. Can someone that’s smarter than me tell me why this isn’t going to zero (or effectively zero to just reflect cash in hand + a few small items / shares outstanding)