U.S. investment group Hindenburg Research will be disbanded, its founder Nate Anderson said Wednesday, adding that it has completed the projects it was handling.
Founded in 2017 as a kind of corporate muckraker, the short- seller with around 10 employees has pushed several companies to admit accounting errors or misrepresentations.
The company has wiped billions of dollars off companies’ market values, including Indian conglomerate Adani Group after the research firm accused it of “brazen” corporate fraud.
Hindenburg’s biggest success came against telectric truck maker Nikola, which it accused in 2020 of lying about the status of its technology.
“The plan has been to wind up after we finished the pipeline of ideas we were working on,” Anderson said Wednesday.
“And as of the last Ponzi cases we just completed and are sharing with regulators, that day is today,” he added.
Anderson estimates that almost 100 people have been charged civilly or criminally by regulators “at least in part through our work, including billionaires and oligarchs.”
“We shook some empires that we felt needed shaking,” he said.
Looking ahead, Anderson plans to come up with a series of materials and videos “to open-source every aspect of our model and how we conduct our investigations” over the next six months.
In the case of Nikola, it agreed to pay $125 million to the US Securities and Exchange Commission and its founder, Trevor Milton, was found criminally guilty of misleading his company’s shareholders.
The Adani Group lost $150 billion from its market value in 2023 after Hindenburg’s report accused it of fraud.
Published – January 16, 2025 05:19 am IST
