Last Sane Man on Wall Street

Nathan Anderson made his name exposing—and betting against—corporate fraud. But short selling in a frothy pandemic economy can be ruinous.

- By Andrew Rice. Photographs by Philip Montgomery, Massimo Pinca and Reuters

ONE DAY, a man with dreams of riches placed a truck on top of a hill. The vehicle was a big white tractor-trailer, a prototype built by an automotive start-up called Nikola. The company’s boastful founder, Trevor Milton, claimed it was the “holy grail” of the commercial-trucking industry, a semi that ran on hydrogen and was both green and powerful, capable of doing thousand-mile hauls with zero carbon emissions. In reality, the truck had no engine. It was towed up a straight two-lane road. Its driver released the brakes, and it rolled down the hill under the force of gravity, like a child’s wagon. The road had a 3 percent grade, gentle enough that with some creative camerawork, the prototype would appear to be barreling across a flat desert landscape.

On January 25, 2018, Nikola’s official Twitter account posted a swooshing 39-second video of the demonstration. “Behold,” it declared, “the Nikola One in motion.”

Four years and one federal criminal indictment later, the story of the engineless truck can be seen in many ways: as the high point of a scandal at an automaker that briefly had a market cap larger than Ford’s; as a manifestation of this era’s fakeit-till-you-make-it, flack-it-till-you-SPAC-it business ethos; as a cautionary tale of social media’s power to intoxicate the stock-trading masses; as yet another indicator that the market has become detached from reality; and maybe even as a big honking metaphor for an entire economy that is rolling down a hill, inflating, going deranged as crypto wizards conjure imaginary fortunes, companies without a hint of revenue reach multibillion-dollar valuations, and our richest men blast off into outer SPACe.