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by chadash 2100 days ago
I would argue that public markets very much DID do their job here. Once you are public, people can go long or short your stock, unlike private companies where the latter is hard. In this case, someone took a large short position and then went public with accusations against the company. Now the stock is down. Assuming that the accusations are at least partially credible, sounds like a functioning market to me.
3 comments

It's a good start, but their market cap is still 11 billion. For reference, Ford is 27 billion.
The idea seems sane. Maybe GM will execute it. Or some new management.
11 billion for an "idea" isn't sane. The hydrogen tech doesn't exist and possibly never will. Other auto manufacturers are struggling with it. As to the electric truck? Others are far ahead.
Well, when the VC market quickly put together 40 billion for renting office space, so 11B isn't that much nowadays.

There are already around 40 fuel cell stations just in CA, there's similarly around 45 in Germany.

Everything in the Hindenburg Report could have been exposed without the Company going public.

Going public via a SPAC they didn’t have to go through all the rigor associated with a traditional IPO. I’m not sure this is the public markets doing their job so much as exposing a new loophole in the market.

> Everything in the Hindenburg Report could have been exposed without the Company going public.

Yes, but it went public and that gave someone the incentive to expose it. The fact that this stuff wasn't exposed earlier is a failure of the private markets, not the public

I watched a youtube video on the subject, and I was easily left with the impression that it's a very shady company. And I am not an investor in startups in any stretch of imagination.

Yet, people still invest millions, if not billions of dollars into this company.