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Comment by robswc | Hacker News Reader

It’s about time. I just can’t believe how fraud of such a scale can happen. Reminds me of Bernie Madoff.

Nikola is still a $1.3 billion company if you really want your mind blown.

That's the true insanity here. Did they ever sell a truck? In the meanwhile those un-innovative legacy manufacturers have the first working protypes on the road. And where is the Tesla Semi again?

Nikola delivered its first "Nikola Tre" electric truck on December 17, 2021. It announced the start of serial production in March 2022, and delivered 48 trucks in Q2 2022.

According to the company, they remain on target to deliver 300-500 trucks by the end of 2022.

All they've basically done is decided to work with Iveco to electrify existing S-Way trucks.

"As part of the cooperation – which incidentally includes CNH Industrial’s two commercial vehicles and drive brands Iveco and FPT Industrial – it will take over Nikola’s electrical technology and infotainment system. The semi will also be given a design jointly developed by Nikola and Italdesign."

So badge engineering and electrifying existing vehickes, at a shockingly low volume, and based on fraud to hyoe all that justifies a 1 billion evaluation nowadys. Nice.

The Tesla Semi is being produced right now for some contract deliveries, announced last week.

They announced a lot of things since the announcement in 2017 though. Let's not take Tesla's announcements as anything else than stunts for now, like, really.

And meanwhile Volvo has three fully electrical semis in serial production and Mercedes started serial production of an electric Actros.

Yup, plenty of large electric commercial vehicles on the road already, mainly in Norway I'd bet.

According to wikipedia they sold 93 trucks yes. All recalled because a seat-belt issue (that's how I got '93'), but it seems they have some trucks on the road right now, whatever the quality (and unlike Tesla, btw)

Stock markets were broken, and probably still are to some degree. Just look at valuations of "tech" companies and it should be quite clear why the numbers are so big.

That's the point, it's like they were super sloppy in the due diligence process/es, if there was any at all.

Far bigger frauds have happened. I'd argue Nikola's fraud was pretty minor in comparison to the likes of Madoff, Enron, or Theranos.

At least the only victims here were investors - many of whom probably realised or suspected that Milton was exaggerating the company's progress, but were happy to play along as long as it kept pumping the value of their investments.

Check Nikola spots like the subreddit, Twitter, Stocktwits. Lots of bag holders who are technically investors, but really just ordinary middle class people in deep losses from Nikola.

Still nothing close to the examples you gave but Theranos is as blatantly a con from the get go as Nikola.

I think the difference with Theranos is that most of us were genuinely surprised and shocked when it all started to unravel to the extent that it did.

With Nikola, there were plenty of skeptics right from the start. The only surprise what that it went on for as long as it did, and that the stock price kept going up even after much of their deception was exposed.

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