I haven't shorted Nikola but FWIW I precommit to donating $100 extra to charity and tweet "Hah, shows what I know about public markets" if they are a going concern in 365 days.
If this is a new story to you: hindenburgresearch.com/nikola/
"Why not short them?"
Boring reasons, mostly along the lines of "I have spent about as much as I want to spend this year eating humble pie about my ability to outperform the financial markets, and do not have sufficient cycles to figure out what I'd need to do differently."
But the overwhelming weight of evidence suggests that they have a habit of, and this is a technical accounting term, "making shit up."
And your friendly local Dangerous Professional will tell you that founder reality distortion fields, rosy glasses, aggressive accounting treatments, etc etc, are things that have been known to happen, but the combination of making shit up and getting called on it is a bad one.
This is one of those cases where reality has basically infinite detail to it and when the narrative is wonderful but reality fails to sustain details which are unambiguous and impossible to either get wrong by mistake or fake, assume the narrative is has many more holes in it.
Some technologists laugh about the HTML5 Supercomputer thing. I laugh a bit less; many executives really are that clueless about technology, including some in legitimate businesses.
The sort of thing that sets me to red alert is confabulating a solar panel installation.
"You'd lie? On an entirely inconsequential thing? For a momentary rush of brand equity in an interview almost nobody will see? On an issue where there's not a scintilla of plausible deniability, because you'd have seen it with your own two eyes? And where lack of it same?"
"... I think you might be a liar."
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