A sample of old HN threads (this one's the origin of the "HTML5 supercomputer" classic),

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24436721 ("Nikola: How to Parlay an Ocean of Lies into a Partnership with GM (hindenburgresearch.com)" (2020), 414 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24473231 ("Nikola admits prototype was rolling downhill in promotional video (arstechnica.com)" (2020), 248 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27996321 ("Grand jury indicts Trevor Milton, Nikola founder, on three counts of fraud (cnbc.com)" (2021), 509 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38685607 ("Nikola founder to be sentenced for federal fraud charges (cnbc.com)" (2023), 186 comments)

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=nikola&sort=byPopularity

There is also this older one (when they launched?):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11683508

To give HN credit, the overwhelming sentiment at the time is that this was a very suspicious and scammy endeavor already right at launch.

So what companies is HN calling out in 2025?

Wondering who I should expect to collapse in 2030.

I always wondered how it kept some value for a long time after the Hindenburg Research report[1]. To me, the report (and the CEO's empty response to it) made it clear there was pretty much no value in it, but the stock only lost 50% in the following week.

[1] https://hindenburgresearch.com/nikola/

It's almost like stock value and real value have been entirely decoupled

I mean they still had ~$50 million in cash on hand, plus some teams and prototypes. I certainly wouldn't have invested, but if you have $50 million, the potential to sell more stock, and a prototype there's still a lot you can do.

If a business has $50 million in cash on hand and no significant liabilities, the business is worth at least $50 million, no doubt.

However that still leaves $29.95 billion of the $30 billion valuation unexplained.

SMCI lost 60% after its auditor failed to audit and resigned

after that, it roses 300%

SMCI is also a target of hindenburg

https://hindenburgresearch.com/smci/

before this, I didn't even know that a company that couldn't be audited could still be listed.

Auditing a company is not a normal procedure. Many companies, even in the S&P500, may have trouble during an audit. I remember there was a serious report about GE at one time, they decided to split the company as a response.

By law, any public company in the US (and most other countries) are required to have a financial statement audit. I am sure there are instances where it is not required, but substantially all private companies that have debt are required per their credit agreement to have a financial statement audit completed. I would be interested where you are getting your information that auditing a company is not a normal process.

Public companies have to undergo a financial audit every year. If you’re referring to a tax audit from the IRS, then yes, those are rarer.

People also bought Fisker cars again, even knowing that the company produced defective cars before going bankrupt last time (which they did again this time).

I think its because Fisker was in bankruptcy and the cars were sold at deep discounts as part of liquidation.

People also bought them well before bankruptcy. I saw them around, and someone at work was telling me how he's buying one.

Maybe because investors assumed they could sell their shares to the next sucker.

How many people who own stocks actually give a shit about the company they invest in (for about 5 seconds)?

But these are customers, not investors.

The reborn Fisker only inherited the brand name, everything from design to manufacturing was entirely new. In hindsight maybe they brought the curse onto themselves...

It was also the same founder. But the name does matter, since it's their reputation.

I watched a Demuro video where he visited Nikola's factory. Yes, the founder defrauded investors, but it's clear the engineers were building real things. They just were nowhere near where the founder claimed. So there is probably some value there, as it's not complete vaporware. But clearly they couldn't turn it around.

> but it's clear the engineers were building real things

Nikola did not build their own vehicles. They bought their vehicles from Iveco in Europe and made small modifications including putting their names on them.

I totally agree. But it feels like, at least over the past 20ish years or so, that the increased "gambling-ification" of the stock market has made it so these events take longer to resolve (i.e it takes longer for the stock price to go to 0) even if all participants eventually think it will go to 0.

That is, even though the stock will (and, in this case, did) eventually go to 0 with very little statistical probably of an alternative, there is enough volatility in the interim that stock market participants are just playing that volatility in the short term (i.e. trying to time the market, trying to not be "bag holders" in WSB parlance) even if everyone knows in the long term it's going to 0.

This one in particular was the perfect storm because it was an EV company during an EV bubble / govt subsidy frenzy, combined with the overall auto market being out of wack at the time, and pandemic-era extremely low rates.

Briefly more valuable than the ford motor company. SPACs were borderline criminal enterprises, though this one was outright criminal.

And yet...just watch all the people who will think because they raised $700m that they're a success to be emulated. People still fervently defend Elizabeth Holmes.

Well, yes, there was a product that never worked, and conviction + prison sentencing for fraud, and the bankruptcy, and out of work workers and shafted suppliers...but we shouldn't let that detract from the positive!

> People still fervently defend Elizabeth Holmes.

Dozens!

There’s quite a few driving around SoCal, mostly by WattEV for testing. Figured they were selling enough to keep going but guess not.

> Figured they were selling enough to keep going but guess not.

They were buying their vehicles from Iveco in Europe. Putting their name on them and selling them at a loss here in the US. Making money by selling vehicles was never the goal with this company. Defrauding foolish investors was the primary money maker.

“The stock is the product!”

The entire purpose of Nikola was to create proliferation route for taxpayer dollars into private bank accounts. To this end, they were moderately successful.

A few other ding dongs, like GM, didn't do their due diligence and also fell for it.

In GM's defense, the deal with Nikola didn't really cost them anything. It only damaged their reputation. Some other clueless investors then assumed that GM had done due diligence before signing the agreement, which was never the case.

If somebody is interested in how the Nikola Trucks drive, there is a great YouTube channel from a German truck driver, that drives the European version (IVECO) of the Nikola truck on a daily basis across Europe.

https://www.youtube.com/@electrictrucker

German channel: https://www.youtube.com/@elektrotrucker

> the European version (IVECO) of the Nikola truck on a daily basis across Europe

That's a wildly misleading way of wording that.

Iveco make trucks and vans and buses. Nikola bought some of them and rebadged them and tried to pass them off as their own revolutionary prototypes. There's a YouTuber driving the real thing, which is entirely unrelated to Nikola in any way.

Thanks for pointing that out, I don't know a lot about Nikola and the Icevo partnership. The YouTube channel is still worth watching.

Apparently some of the software in Nikola vehicles was written in Crystal [1]. [1] https://manas.tech/blog/2020/02/11/nikola-motor-company/

Interesting. That’s only the second time I’ve heard of crystal being used in production. The first is Kagi, which uses it in search query processing.

>in production

are there Nikola trucks on the road right now?

> are there Nikola trucks on the road right now

Importantly, under their own power, and not going downhill.

Remember when they rolled a car down hill because it couldn’t even drive?

I couldn't believe people kept pumping this company like it had real promise after that came out.

I have no idea how they managed to survive for years after that. The CEO was found guilty of fraud, and it didn't seem like they had any actual product.

It's the natural extension of the startup ideology to non-software industries. How many times on this website have you seen 'founders' be celebrated for doing 'epic demo hacks' at least this fraudulent? How many tech startups achieve massive valuations with a broken product and a totally hypothetical pathway to profitability?

It's easy to see through this showmanship when the product is a car. So why not when the product is software?

Can't speak for anyone else, but I have an issue when it's software too [1].

I think the reason that it's more prevalent with software is that it's easier to hand-wave away stuff, because you can say "well we're creating the market for this field". I don't fall for that stuff anymore, but I did when I was first starting in this field.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41723417

Can you point me to one single example of "a founder being celebrated on this website for 'epic demo hacks' that are fraudulent"?

Genuinely asking.

Be sure that the fraud is obvious at the time of the post (and not in retrospect), is actively celebrated at the time.

You mean anyone that uses growth hacks? There have been many growth hack posts here. Pretty much every single start up has used some to attract investors.

> Can you point me to one single example of "a founder being celebrated on this website for 'epic demo hacks' that are fraudulent"?

Something, something [..] bulletproof Cybertruck [..]

Financial momentum.

You have a bunch of people who consider themselves "the smart money" who have been had, and if they pull out, that's an acknowledgment that perhaps they're not that smart.

That was a classic. They should have pivoted to comedy.

How do you even make an electric car that can't drive? Electric drivetrains are way, way simpler than ICE ones...

No they aren't. We've been making ICE vehicles for 100 years. The drivetrains are well understood and don't present any technical hurdles. Especially in trucks. EV heavy trucks are still pretty uncharted territory.

There were literally electric cars 140 years ago. Getting enough energy density in a battery is a definite technological problem that's difficult, but making a car move with an electric motor isn't.

> How do you even make an electric car that can't drive?

The "pusher" truck was not supposed to be EV. It was supposed to be a Hydrogen truck. In reality it was neither.

Reality has a surprising amount of detail: http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-...

I have no doubt it's entirely possible to make an electric truck, but you still have to spend a year in the trenches actually doing it and solving all the little design problems before you have something to show off.

Especially if you weren't previously making ICE trucks. Then you have to learn how to make a truck from scratch, instead of just the new electric parts. You can of course buy an ICE truck and convert it for your prototype, which I think is what Edison Motors did, but then you'll be showing off a rusty old truck that won't get any venture capital or journalist attention because it's nowhere near shiny enough.

Imagine if someone had said this about Tesla. They would have been swamped if wall of text responses. At least Nikola delivered what they promised.

They decidedly did not deliver what they promised. Their hydrogen truck did not work, which is why their promo video had to tow a truck up a hill and film it rolling down.

At least funnily the video delivered its promise as it was titled “Nikola One in Motion”

Technically correct, which is the best kind of correct.

What did they deliver that they promised?

Imagine if Tesla copied another automaker's name then created a demo of their car rolling down a hill.

Trevor, is that you?

> At least Nikola delivered what they promised.

Ah yes. The Nikola Gravity Drive™ has been a roaring success and is now powering millions of trucks worldwide. This bankruptcy is merely a blip in their continuing success.

Hydrogen has its place in our energy economy but its got too many issues to be used to power vehicles. Batteries have won, and synthesized hydrocarbons will be the alternative for where batteries won't work (i.e., most commercial air travel).

That said, it's a pity to see this failure.

> Hydrogen has its place in our energy economy

It certainly does not! (At least, not in any meaningful sense).

A) How do you store it?

Hydrogen does not compress to a liquid (except a cryogenic temperatures), meaning storage requires bulky, heavy and dangerous high pressure storage..... or cryo kit.

B) Where do you get the hydrogen from?

Electrolysis of water gives less hydrogen energy out than electrical energy you put in.... its more efficient to use the electrical energy directly. Currently we obtain hydrogen from natural gas, which itself is a finite resource (not to mention CO2 is emitted when extracting the hydrogen from gas).

Seriously, the sums don't add up and hydrogen is a looser however you look at it. The only people promoting it here are the natural gas industry who are looking to get money pushing the "hydrogen economy" vapourware.

I agree with most of what you’ve said, but there are some niche uses.

https://www.liebreich.com/hydrogen-ladder-version-5-0/

There are a lot of hydrogen vehicles on the road already, especially buses.

Where?

Uh nvm, a lot of the ones I was thinking of are natural gas. The hydrogen ones are mostly in China.

I've also seen many Toyota Mirais on the road in California, but turns out their sales are poor nowadays.

> Electrolysis of water gives less hydrogen energy out than electrical energy you put in....

This is literally all energy storage... Lithium-ion batteries lose about 10-20% during charging and another 5% during discharge.

How do you figure any energy storage medium would give you more than 100% of the energy you put into it?

The efficiency of using electricity to split water, then compressing and transporting the hydrogen, then using that hydrogen in a fuel cell to power an electric motor, is much worse than using electricity to charge a battery to power an electric motor.

Also electricity is available almost everywhere. Hydrogen is only available at a few specialized fueling stations.

Electrolysis is actually around 80% efficient. The main issue is infrastructure, you're right about that.

But the comment I initially responded to said there's energy loss as though that's not the case with literally every type of energy storage.

Splitting water is only one step in getting electricity to move a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle's wheels. Compressing hydrogen is around 90% efficient. Fuel cells in vehicles are around 60% efficient at converting hydrogen and oxygen to electricity. And motors are around 90% efficient. Assuming zero energy costs to transport the hydrogen to fueling stations, your "well to wheel" efficiency is 35-40%. In practice it's around 30%. For battery electric vehicles, efficiency is around 60%.

And then there are the safety and performance issues. You need new infrastructure to store and transport hydrogen. You need special sensors to detect hydrogen leaks, as any odorant will damage fuel cells. Due to ideal gas law, refueling cools the nozzle. With a high duty cycle, the nozzle can freeze to the vehicle even in southern California. Most climates will need heating elements on the nozzle and/or vehicle to deal with this. Different fueling stations have different pressures, meaning that a 5,000psi fueling station can only fill a 10,000psi tank to 50% capacity. Fueling stations leak hydrogen, so they can't be in convenient locations like parking garages or homes.

Given these issues, I think for applications where batteries lack the required energy density, synthetic fuels are much more likely to win than hydrogen. Their safety issues are familiar to everyone and they can take advantage of existing infrastructure.

> It certainly does not! (At least, not in any meaningful sense).

The problem is, there are applications that for the foreseeable future cannot be made to work on batteries - airplanes larger than bushcraft and large-scale maritime shipping (the large ocean liners carry upwards of a million gallons of fuel).

Assuming we want to convert these away from fossil fuels - which we have to! - there are only two renewable alternatives: biofuels, which carry serious ethical implications given world hunger and soil depletion, and synthfuels made from hydrogen and sequestered CO2 as base chemicals. The problem is, synthfuels are absurdly expensive because there is no hydrogen market yet so there isn't much happening in scaling up from lab-scale.

There are some enormous issues regarding hydrogen storage that will need to be resolved before it will be usable on aircraft.

Pressure vessels are heavy, hydrogen is explosive, both of those are incompatible with aircraft.

That's why I said: "synthfuels made from hydrogen and sequestered CO2 as base chemicals."

You need to combine the hydrogen and CO2 into methane and from that into longer-chain liquid hydrocarbons, and that process is complex and energy-intensive even if you use microbes for the job.

Ohhhh.... That is what you said, apologies. Yes I'm all aboard the synthetic fuels train so long as it remains carbon neutral and can run at some reasonable degree of efficiency. Or we figure out how to make enormous amounts of power in a renewable and cheap manner.

synthfuels will catch up eventually, the economics keep getting better and there’s really no alternative

I wish I could upvote this twice. I grow so tired of people simping for hydrogen when batteries just win in every metric aside from the initial build cost, which when amortized over the life of the battery, will beat out hydrogen.

On top of the storage problems, and the problems of the energy needed to create the hydrogen, you then have to have a massive hydrogen distribution network that's on par with the current gas distribution network. With battery EVs, it's just a matter of building chargers that connect to the existing power grid, with many (possibly most) EV owners charging at home.

As far as I'm concerned, anybody pushing for hydrogen fueled vehicles is simply falling for marketing bullshit. Producing a hydrogen-powered car would likely become cheaper than a BEV, but they'll never be better for the environment in the long run, and will never be cheaper to operate. It's always going to be cheaper to just put electricity directly into a battery rather than use it to create hydrogen, distribute it, and then pump it.

> I grow so tired of people simping for hydrogen when batteries just win in every metric aside from the initial build cost, which when amortized over the life of the battery, will beat out hydrogen

Batteries suck in energy density and weight and in some cases, that really matters. Battery electric planes are not even close to being feasible other than for very small in size and range planes. Hydrogen is at least feasible.

Bio-Fuel seems more practical.

It reuses all the existing infrastructure and requires no engine modifications.

No. It's practically impossible to scale them to the required level

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADpsUhdIO4w a video by a pilot on SAF and why it just won't cut it.

I challenge the assertion that hydrogen is feasible.

Is hydrogen more energy dense (in either energy per unit volume OR per unit weight) than traditional fuels?

It might be better than batteries, but I'd be surprised if it was any better than current fuels.

> Is hydrogen more energy dense ... than traditional fuels

Chemically, yes. But in reality, very far from it.

The bulky high pressure cylinders needed to store the gas (unlike propane etc, it doesn't liquify) easily weigh an order of magnitude more than the mass of gas they contain.

Green hydrogen as a power source was and still is the primary plan in the Germany green party program in order to solve the grid-scale battery issue, and was the primary argument in EU when they defined natural gas as a green transition solution. Are you saying that this strategy was the natural gas industry all along, and that green hydrogen in grid-scale size is unlikely to solve the problem of climate change?

The fact is that we are now years and years into hydrogen and we still have (almost) nothing to show for it. The number of electric cars and trucks vastly outnumbers the number of hydrogen cars and trucks. So the hydrogen people moved on to factories. But with the history of cars and trucks in mind, it will probably lead to nothing too. Also note that all hydrogen cars and trucks are funded by subsidies and still they one by one go out of favor. It just appears that it doesn't work. It's probably time to call it a day by now.

>> Hydrogen has its place in our energy economy

> It certainly does not! (At least, not in any meaningful sense).

I was speaking to the use of hydrogen for ammonia production. When we experience grid imbalances from when there's too much solar or wind energy for the grid to absorb it would be nice to put it to use in that regard rather than dumping it.

I understand and do not contest the problems that working with hydrogen creates, it makes a lousy option for a battery.

This company was an elaborate con, legitimately. Its failure is justice.

So much so that the CEO was convicted of fraud over it. It's insane that it still had value after the Hindenburg report.

> That said, it's a pity to see this failure.

Nikola did not really make anything. They bought trucks from Iveco in Europe and resold them here. They would sometimes customize a few things including putting their logo on the trucks.

This is chapter 11, not 7. So they think there is still a viable business here after restructuring.

They filed a Sale Motion for all the assets.

Electric truck ... nuff said

Why is that? Light duty trucks and SUVs outsell cars in the US. They are comfortable to ride in, have better leg room and head room, and have a heavier duty frame that enables them to haul and tow more as needed. You can fit a plow on many trucks as well in snowy regions.

Electrifying them has only upsides with the exception of road weight and range, but I'm repeatedly told that's not a problem for cars anymore.

Granted, the F150 lightning hasn't done well compared to Ford's expectations, which might say a lot about the reality of range concerns (especially when towing).

They pivoted from pure BEV to bet their future on Hydrogen FCEV trucks. They were a flop and that's what sunk them IMO.

In contrast to the failed Nikola approach there's a small Aussie company that seems to be doing quite well with electric truck conversions. Rather than build in batteries like in cars they swap packs using a forklift -

vid https://youtu.be/9eYLtPSf7PY?t=145

Seems quite a good idea to me - it's a different market to cars where no one wants to muck around with forklifts, whereas with trucks they use forklifts to load stuff anyway and people don't especially want to have to plug it in for hours to recharge.

Also you can charge the batteries while not installed using things like solar, whereas with built in batteries like on the Tesla semi you need a lot of grid power to supercharge.

There's also a small Canadian company called Edison Motors that's doing some very interesting work in developing hybrid diesel-electric logging and back-country hauling trucks. They've taken a far saner approach to growth (Ie. not the typical SV hyperscalling model) and are actually building trucks that solve real world problems and I am personally a huge fan of them. They might not have the glitz or funding of your typical "Startup" but they are actually building a sustainable business that has a very good chance thriving for decades to come.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=an6e2Lh9u58