Comment by eigenvalue
4 years ago
It does sound pretty bad, doesn't it? The guy certainly seems to have a problem with telling the truth. I think it's crazy to compare him to Musk, since Musk is actually extremely smart and knowledgeable about multiple areas of engineering. This other guy is just parotting the same lines, like "we are an advanced energy company that just happens to sell cars!". It's like the cargo-cult version of Tesla without any interesting technology or innovation. All that being said, I hope the author of this write-up has a good lawyer!
Musk has also had some interesting/uneasy relationship history with the truth. This guy does seem to be taking it quite a bit farther and leaving a lot more daylight visible between his statements and the truth.
Not close to the same thing.
Musk has a history of building and shipping successful products company after company in spite of a constant amount of people saying he would fail. (X.com, Paypal, Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, Boring).
Nikola is a complete fraud that collected money from know-nothing investors riding on EVs and Tesla's name. They haven't shipped anything and probably never will. Bizarrely positively portrayed in the press alongside negative Tesla stories - I imagine because it's good for clicks?
I find it hard to believe the SPAC that brought them public wasn't solely for the purpose of allowing them to steal as much as they could from the public before they shut down. No idea how well they played it - I guess we'll see if anyone ends up in prison.
At least he got to con his way into a fancy ranch in the mean time: https://www.latimes.com/business/real-estate/story/2019-11-1...
People like this make the world worse for the rest of us (and make it harder for honest startups to raise money).
Honestly it's testament to the people in Musk's inner circle and his engineering departments more than the man himself. I'd say he is really good at associating with clever people and organizing collaborations. At the end of the day, he is a billionaire who makes headlines because of the irony of the fact that he probably has ADHD and trolls on twitter and seemingly doesn't care about his reputation, while also heading all these companies. He's a loudmouth cowboy, which is like the archetype American hero.
Some people are attracted to rich arrogance more than anything. It's why people pay money to read fluff piece autobiographies ghostwritten for billionaires. It's why people like martin shkreli still have strong fanbases on the internet. Tesla may be a good company, but good companies are not built by one person, and fanboys are usually blind to that fact.
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Musk has history of building and shipping products, yes.
But he's also no stranger to fraud, lies and defrauding investors. Solar roof is best example of that ([1] and [2] talk about it, but there's more stories about it).
Solar roof was 100% fake product, that was shown only to justify fraudulently bailing out his other insolvent business. Years later, Tesla still doesn't have solar roof product (they do some solar roof installation, of roof made by Changzhou Almaden, Chinese company [3]).
[1] https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2019/08/28/1566985766000/The-gre...
[2] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/09/solarcity-was-in...
[3] https://www.pv-tech.org/news/changzhou-almaden-supplying-tes...
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Placing Neuralink and Boring on the list of successful companies is a bit premature.
Do neuralink or boring have successful products? or just demos of already existing tech?
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I agree. Real artists ship. Musk ships.
If you change some people's names, company names and technology names, you could make this an article that's talking about Theranos.
How are you judging SpaceX, Neuralink, & Boring to be successes? They’re fine companies with good products, but none of them have fulfilled Musk’s original stated goals: going to Mars, transhumanism, and networks of tunnels for mass transit, respectively. When people say those companies will fail, I imagine the argument is that they won’t achieve these goals. Which, for the time being, is still true. Although it’s true that at least Musk actually builds things.
(Some bold takes? Level 5 self driving cars the way we commonly envision it won’t ever come to fruition, SpaceX will never go to Mars, transhumanism will never come to pass, and hyperloops won’t either. You can come back in 5 years and gloat if I’m wrong.)
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Musk has actually delivered ground breaking tech in multiple fields though. He talks big but he usually (eventually) backs it up. No other company has managed to send rockets to space and then land them again. No other company has managed to sell fully electric cars en-masse like Tesla has done.
Yeah, he certainly invests in innovative high-tech industries and I like that a lot. But he also overpromises a lot, e.g. coast-to-coast tesla autopilot (probably not happening anytime soon) or something actually useful with the neurochip (also years ahead). some of his remarks on AI also tells me that he has a feeling that he knows everything about everything but that might not be exactly the case. he is a smart guy and he got rich basically by having a really good electronic payment system. but that does not make him a universal engineer/scientist/philosopher.
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No other company?
Nissan Leaf? Close to 1/2 million sold.
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> No other company has managed to send rockets to space and then land them again.
* orbit
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Yeap, like a pig with telepathic abilities /s
Seriously, stop being so naive.
They only land the first stage(s), and those don't see space...
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It’s not Musk, but the workers that did all of that.
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There’s always danger of “smelling your own farts” syndrome, though. Like the whole submarine thing: it didn’t work! No doubt that Musk is very smart and knowledgable in the areas he has excelled. But a few times now he seemed to have decided that this means he’s smart in a whole load of other areas too, without much evidence. Another example is almost any time he talks about AI.
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I'm no Musk fanboy and this isn't meant to be a defense of Musk, but in my opinion, Musk exaggerates and over promises. He'll say intentionally vague things and let people fill in the blanks and not correct them when they are wrong. It's all a little slimy and grey, but there's usually at least a modicum of truth to the things he says or he at least believes what he's saying at the time he says it.
From what I've heard recently Nikola just seems like straight up lies and fraud from trying to piggy back on the success of Tesla.
Neither are good, but one is much worse in my opinion.
> Musk exaggerates and over promises
True. But he also delivers on most of them. What I find most optimistic about his statements are basically the timeframes. Self-driving is taking longer than initially thought, and so is Mars. But there's been major progress across multiple (difficult) industries.
We can't compare him with the copycat company (not even the name is original!)
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The FTC should look into Musk's statements about self-driving, how it's almost done, etc. All that does is trick Tesla owners into paying for the $8000 upgrade for a product that will never, ever come, guaranteed. It just won't happen and he keeps peddling the product like it's only a year away, for the last several years. It's outright fraud and he should be taken to task for it. And for the record, I'm a Tesla-owner.
If you set an unrealistic goal that you won't accomplish but try really hard to reach it, in most cases your end result and the progress you made along the way will be far far better than when you set a realistic goal and reach it.
I always set unrealistic bars for myself. And in the end I get more from not reaching my goal than I would from reaching a lower one.
You're pointing at exactly what allows a skilled conman to succeed: To a casual, or even non-expert observer, the difference between a genius and a skilled impersonation of a genius will appear very small. You might not be able to make the distinction, and erroneously consider them equivalent.
the big difference between a pitch and a fraud is eventual intention. Seriously, even company name implies fraud by association
It sounds bad, but I thought of another way to look at it.
Nikola's product is the brand of being a hip, "with it" electric car company, like Tesla, but different, and they are selling it to GM. It's a simple straightforward win-win, and everything that looks like fakery is beside the point. It has solid value to GM precisely because of the inflated, arguably irrational value of Tesla.
Now, I'm not investing, but it did occur to me to look at it that way. They are not actually in the same business as Tesla or GM. They're laundering cool factor.
I really like the cargo cult note. There are a lot of people building runways in the jungle hoping planes will land and bring cargo, so to speak, in tech. These people can and do make it into public markets (see Nikola) but it’s even more prevalent in private markets. It’s more important than ever to have technical people in private equity, not just VC.
He even ripped off the company's name...
This might be a coincidence but I thought it was funny that the NKLA stock symbol mimicks Tesla's TSLA symbol.
> The guy certainly seems to have a problem with telling the truth.
I actually disagree with this take but it gets close to the problem with Trevor Milton. Trevor is very unpolished. I'm skeptical of how detailed he gets with all the in's and out's with the technologies he's trying to innovate and make more efficient. What's going for him is a few things, he's partnering with many companies which means he's mitigating the company's risk. Now that Musk created the market, others want to join in and try whatever route that sticks.
Musk on the other hand, speaks in more precise words when describing a topic. Musk does sell vaporware but...eventually (behind 'schedule') Musk delivers. This lazy focus on manifesting a specific vision what what Musk is doing. He'll let the entire engineering department go, if they aren't willing to work hard at making the future a reality.
Going full circle, the energy density of hydrogen fuel cell is the future. I don't see how it's not. All you need now is for Toyota to join forces with them and you'll have an unstoppable force that will help reduce emission drastically and at a large scale. The technology is very close (1, maybe 2 iterations away) and I doubt they are far away from a breakthrough. I don't believe Milton could've focused on Hydrogen semi's prior to the success of Tesla, he doesn't have that skill but...he's making due with what he's after. He's also being wise at selling electric trucks too because the market is primed for it (read: Musk primed it).
In conclusion, there are a lot of investors deep into Nikola. If Milton gets in the way of bringing this realistic engineering challenge to market, the investors will change it up. I'm not certain of how much voting say that Milton has but...it's a good sign that he stepped back from CEO role. He's way too sloppy with his words but...he brings the hype and investors are still wanting his hype. It's messy but nothing worth doing is ever blameless.
P.S. I don't own either stock. Nor any energy/battery/car/electric stocks. I'm just interested in advancing our technology.
> Going full circle, the energy density of hydrogen fuel cell is the future.
Based on what? Just looking at the density is not enough. You have to look at the whole system from generation to actually driving.
The hydrogen system is even in the best case, assume multiple many, many improvements in mass manufacturing and so on, only half as efficient as an electric system.
Battery technology is improving at a far faster rate then hydrogen technology, its not even remotely close. By the time your predicted ' (1, maybe 2 iterations away)' happens, batteries will have made 5 iterations.
The DoD for example is already sponsoring a massive program that companies lots of universities and national labs to work on Lithium Sulfur batteries that could double or triple the density of current Li batteries while also being quite a bit cheaper.
Silicon anode batteries are already in the early stages of commercialisation and they will make commercial aviation feasible.
And even if you insist on using chemical fuel, why would you use hydrogen? If you want to drive a truck a long distance at a time, you could just use dimethyl ether, methnol or something like that. That would solve tons of problem with storage and so on.
I really don't understand why people are so fascinated with hydrogen, while it continue to disappoint for 30 years. Even in the space industry, where fuel cell used to be used all the time there use has fallen out of favor.
> Just looking at the density is not enough.
On the contrary, it should be the driving force about making long-term decisions to benefit society. Hell, I'd be all for mini-nuclear in vehicles but the ability to make it safe is such a high threshold that it's not even remotely feasible.
No one thought electric cars would be where they are today. Elon made this electric car market happen by making it sexy (and selling only premium cars) which helped him double down on the real vision. There is a ceiling for the battery and it's not as high as many think.
We'll see what Tesla battery day shows but my main point is this: That to improve society with long-term thinking, we need to be more innovative and it's my opinion that attacking Milton's weaknesses is a waste of the public's time/energy. Especially when short sellers get a lot more freedom in how they deal with the market. No one is being a fair arbiter of the facts. Hydrogen is better for hauling big loads, it just is. To bring that to market is Nikola's real challenge. The upside to hydrogen is greater than the upside of li-ion, full stop. Shouldn't we want the better solution for society?
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> Battery technology is improving at a far faster rate then hydrogen technology, its not even remotely close. By the time your predicted ' (1, maybe 2 iterations away)' happens, batteries will have made 5 iterations.
I'm curious what this is based on. Last I checked, the li-ion batteries of today are basically the same from the ones we had 10-15 years ago. Sure, a little more silicon, a little less cobalt, but ultimately the same chemistry.
The biggest change for fuel cells is that they're moving from science project to mass production. There will be easily orders of magnitude reduction in cost. While this won't go forever, for the foreseeable future we should see a much faster rate of change for fuel cells and not batteries.
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What possibly could they have to offer for Toyota? It doesn't look like they did any work or even had anyone capable of researching hydrogen cells working for them.
Instead of advancing technology, they might have taken funding and credibility actual companies could have used.
The founder has so far answered just one real question on twitter, about what they were going to bring to the GM produced car: "100% a badger. We will use common parts for example; tires, window regulators, hvac, brakes & batteries to drive down cost, but the badger is completely a badger. The infotainment, displays, software, ota, app, cab, interior, user experience, sales, service, warranty etc is ours"
That's a long way to say they'll use their software and sales team.
I don't see it as very different from Tesla, since when they started there was no real technology to talk about. The CEO of Tesla is also well known to be untrustworthy with his promises, having even being formally investigated by the SEC for stock price manipulation. I don't know the future, but there is a possibility that they will also develop the needed technology to make it all work.
I have met people like Nikola's CEO, and I bet my dear life that nothing will ever be delivered, except if the technology exists to completely - I mean exactly 100% - outsource it using the cash given by others and slap a logo on the result, failing in the end anyway. When you see a company so hell bent and putting so much effort in tricking investors AND actively avoiding doing any real work, you know what's happening. If you, and more importantly people with money to invest, are persuaded that "it's not different from Tesla", that's a victory for Nikola, and their sole source of income.
> since when they started there was no real technology to talk about
That is flat false, making a automotive battery out of laptop batteries was quite a technology development. They also made their own engines and inverters from the beginning.
> The CEO of Tesla is also well known to be untrustworthy with his promises
Actually the opposite, it is well known that when he says something its very likely going to happen. As most of the things he say, no matter how crazy to turn out to actually happen.
Arguable there is no other human alive in the world today, that when he say 'We are gone do X' that more people believe could actually do it.
> having even being formally investigated by the SEC for stock price manipulation.
He wasn't investigated for stock price manipulation, he was investigated for improper communication to stock holders.
> I don't know the future, but there is a possibility that they will also develop the needed technology to make it all work.
So even after 10 years of consistently laying every year, announcing dozens of technologies that all turn out to be totally fake you still think they can do it. That seems beyond utterly blue-eye to me.