Had not heard of this company until recently. Pretty good fake.
An update on the cover-up:
That’s par for today’s world.
You get caught running a con and the first thing you do is file actions to ensure the law-abiding folks exposing you have to suppress their legit evidence of your crime.
Sounds like a perfect setup for the whistle blowers to launch a RICO and/or anti-SLAPP counteraction.
Oh, and things got crazier and crazier. I was keeping up with everything on Jalopnik.
Their CEO was whacky and … well …
Aren’t lots of truck ad videos fake? You see a pickup zooming up a rough road on a mountain–and it real life it only crawls (particularly if you don’t want to destroy the vehicle’s suspension).
It’s a semi, not a pickup.
Visual puffery is one thing, telling investors in a public company that a truck was moving under its own power when it was actually rolling down a hill is quite another.
BTW, I believe that the fakeness of the truck demo was first confirmed (though suspected earlier) by the short seller report from Hindenburg Research. (Yes, they named themselves Hindenburg.)
It’s a fascinating report and goes into exhaustive detail about all the fakery and lies at Nikola. The stock continues to plummet and their CEO has resigned and their putative deal with GE is now in jeopardy.
Not a bad name for a company whose product is predictions about which things currently floating high are full of hot air* and doomed to crash and burn soon.
* Yes, I know the HIndenburg flew on hydrogen, not hot air. Gimme a little room for hyperbole here.
certainly reminds me of Elizabeth Holmes, she was so fake she even used a deeper fake voice to sound more powerful
Or Liz Carmichael.
First time I’ve ever heard of this company.
Are we all just pretending not to notice that calling themselves “Nikola” is a blatantly transparent attempt to piggyback on the fame of Tesla?
So they’re doing the same thing that Elon Musk’s company is doing?
I think a fair number of people think Tesla is a made up name and not named for a real person. Weezer had a song Buddy Holly and younger people did not know he was a real person
Right, but in the case of both these companies, Nikola and Tesla, they are both named after the inventor.
Nikola Corporation
The company is named after Nikola Tesla but is not related to the inventor.
Tesla, Inc.:
Founded in July 2003 by engineers Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning as Tesla Motors, the company’s name is a tribute to inventor and electrical engineer Nikola Tesla.
There is also the rock band, Tesla. Popular guy, he is.
Just watch out if they start shooting promotional videos for aircraft.
Honestly, I did indeed initially assume Nikola was affiliated with Tesla (as in Elon Musk’s company). I’d previously heard that Tesla was developing a semi, and when I heard Nikola my mind made the obvious connection to Nikola Tesla, and assumed that was what Tesla was calling their semi, or that they’d spun off their semi truck division as a separate subsidiary called Nikola, or something like that. I had to research the company before I realized Nikola Corporation had no affiliation whatsoever with Tesla, Inc.
The aviation industry is full of start-ups with glitzy videos promising shiny new air machines with impossible levels of performance and price. Just send in a $100K deposit to reserve your early delivery date!
It rakes in the (wealthy) rubes every time.
I have seen a lot of that happen in the light aircraft industry, aircraft and engines that were never delivered. Those guys didn’t even have to work hard to rake in the money, they sent out a press release and the money came rolling in. The lucky guys only lost their money, some of these aircraft fell apart in the air.
Take a look at the record of Jim Bede, aircraft designer extraordinaire. He had a long string of business and technical failures but never had a problem finding new investors after each failure.
Yeah, Bede is sort of the elder stateman of that breed. He at least appeared to be trying, at least in the early years. The late 60’s BD-4 was the RV-4 of its day. The -5 & especially -5J? Not so much.
Nowadays it seems like many of these are pure cons.
I don’t think Bede was trying to con anyone, he was just a bad businessman that people were throwing money at. The results were kind of predictable.