Nikola Corporation is a vehicles company that planned to create zero-emission vehicles since 2016. The company is named after Nikola Tesla and reminds me of one more successful electric vehicle company. The company had great presentations with futuristically designed trucks and their stock value has risen from 10 dollars to 65 in the May and June of 2020.
But in September of 2020 researchers from the Hindenburg Research made an article “Nikola: How to Parlay An Ocean of Lies Into a Partnership With the Largest Auto OEM in America“, which crashed Nikola’s stock value. It was proven that Nikola’s vehicles were not able to drive. And all videos by Nikola Corporation were fake. Sometime after the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Department of Justice started the investigation, regarding securities fraud allegations.
Another company with a similar story is LeEco. LeEco is a Chinese company, which was a content supplier from 2004 until 2016. From 2016 they also started to produce electronic devices, such as TV and smartphones. Later the head of the company presented the Chinese electric car. Which was looking like a Tesla.
The head of the company Yueting was nicknamed “the Chinese Elon Musk”, but the car was never sold to anyone. The company wanted to start selling in the US, invested 250 000 000 dollars, and hired 12 000 workers. After some time LeEco admitted, that they overestimated their abilities. The company earned only 13 000 000 dollars and needed new investments, so they took 3.6 billion dollars credit and invested them all in the advertisement, but failed in selling. The company went bankrupt.
The third story will be about a startup called “Theranos”. According to Wikipedia ” It was initially touted as a breakthrough technology company, with claims of having devised blood tests that required only very small amounts of blood and could be performed very rapidly using small automated devices the company had developed” the company was founded by Elizabeth Holmes. The company initially raised “only” a few million dollars a year. Theranos began to receive hundreds of millions of US dollars as investments. Experts estimated its capitalization at 9 billion dollars. And this despite the fact that the financial performance of the company and the technologies used by its specialists remained a secret. In 2015 several publications, including The Wall Street Journal, investigated the activities of a startup. Several experts and employees of the company, reporters concluded that Theranos was conducting its tests on conventional medical equipment taken from hospitals. All test results over the past two years have been declared invalid by Theranos, which means that on the basis of such incorrect blood tests, doctors could make thousands of wrong diagnoses. In 2015 startup Theranos was valued at approximately 4.5 billion dollars and now it is worth nothing.
Maksim Semjonov's E-SPEAIT blog 