Thread by @NeckarValue

“I don’t think most whistleblowers and even short sellers start with the idea that, like, Wow, this can be a great business; all I need to do is pick fights with corporate sociopaths, and I can do really well."

Must-read on @ClarityToast

"Anderson was operating a small brokerage and a software firm that offered due-diligence services to hedge funds. He struggled to make a living. In 2017, his landlord filed suit to evict him from his Inwood apartment. His brokerage reported a net-capital balance of just $58,482"

$NKLA "The rolling truck was the killer detail — the spark that incinerated a high-flying stock to the career-making benefit of Nathan Anderson."

"He used to poke around in shadowy corners, but lately he has been seeing fraud sitting right in the blazing light of day."

“The scale of it is quite massive. I don’t think any system can sustain itself with that scale of grifts happening.”

"A lot of investors prefer the market to be sort of this mass hallucination."

"The market is designed to be a place where these scarce resources of society — capital, labor, materials — are allocated to their most efficient use. But it has just become this otherworldly casino, which is disconnected from the real world.”

“We can find compelling stories all day long, things that we think are totally fucked up,” Block says. “But it’s a lot harder to get investors to think that it matters.”

“I took a very big position” in Riot Blockchain. “I had a very small account and a very young child at home. I wasn’t doing that well. But I believed so strongly in this thesis, the evidence was dead-on, unassailable. I published — and the stock went up, and it kept going up.”

"Your warnings may still be ignored or, even worse, trigger a counterreaction among bullish investors that could end up costing you everything. “Yeah,” Anderson says. “That’s the torture.”
nymag.com/intelligencer/…