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[Business scandal] [Half-assed effort post] Quantumscape, a solid-state battery start-up

My favorite scandals are always corporate frauds like Theranos or Nikola.

Stumbled upon a new one.

Basically, there is a solid-state battery start-up called QuantumScape which went public via an SPAC last year (SPACs are a slightly shady way of going public; it involves a blank-check company....some people think there will be a reckoning in the market soon with a recent deluge of possibly sh*tty companies entering the markets this way). My understanding (gleaned from the article) is if they were able to achieve solid-state batteries it would basically be a huge leap forward in battery technology with extended charges, fast charging. (Please feel free to correct me, I'm not an engineer). An article from June describes the technology and its potential and mentions the company hit a valuation greater than Ford in December 2020. It has since plummeted.

A hedgefund called Scorpion released a presentation basically accusing the company of being a pump and dump scheme. They say the CEO kept going on CNBC to pump his stock so that it wouldn't fall before the lock-up period ended (ie, he isn't allowed to sell his shares right after they first go public, so he needs the stock price to stay high until he can cash out).

The presentation: https://scorpioncapital.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/reports/QS1.pdf

It's a bit dry but there are some hilarious quotes from former employees at the beginning.

Meme stock r-slurs who have seen the stock go from a peak of around $131 to $21 today are absolutely livid about the report: https://old.reddit.com/r/QuantumScape/comments/mrhtxc/scorpion_capital_is_fake_news/

There is also this subreddit as well: https://old.reddit.com/r/QUANTUMSCAPE_Stock/ featuring cope such as this: https://old.reddit.com/r/QUANTUMSCAPE_Stock/comments/pawsg8/patience_will_let_us_win_this_game_and_get_huge/

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Yes, I'm sure something every EV and half of the semiconductor manufacturers in existence have been working on forever was solved by a cagey startup that VW says is a "black box technology."

Almost 100% of black box tech is fudged at best and patently false at worse.

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I studied electrical engineering (autism), and I was warning r-slurs in those subs that it was a scam, but they're all way too high on copium. If solid state batteries get invented, it's going to be in a university lab that has had endless money dumped into it by DARPA.

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EEs just end up programming anyway, but at least you can make your own Arduino projects.

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I've managed to lose my last Arduino project and I'm pissed about it, I had it set up to take commands from a IR remote and send them to my computer.

Now I have to use a mouse and key board like a gaymer

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Man was halfway to inventing the Wii!

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Lol I just needed to find a use for old TV remotes. The TVs they went too have long since broken and been thrownaway but I'll be darned if Imma throw away a perfectly good IR remote

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what's the highest RPM you've gotten in factorio?

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This is true. All the best EEs I know can program better than most CS code monkeys

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Unless they went into software engineering jobs within a few years of graduation, EEs probably aren't going to be familiar with all the nitpicky design bullshit that goes into software engineering.

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You're probably correct. I don't stay up to date on any of it. I choose the more fun r-slur route and get paid to jump out of planes, shoot guns, and stitch people up

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That's not the r-slur route. That sounds like hella fun. Are you able to leverage your EE knowledge in the field?

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electrical engineering

High-IQcel. What kind of work do you do, if I might ask? You can just say the general field if you're paranoid.

(genuinely curious about this though)

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Lmao you'd never guess. I'm basically fancy Army infantry with a higher security clearance who teaches third worlders how to fight. Trained in combat medicine too, so I'm just all over the place. I rarely use my degree, but it comes in handy sometimes with helping to unfrick comms

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I'm basically fancy Army infantry with a higher security clearance who teaches third worlders how to fight.

If you're actually a Green Beret then this is a massive understatement.

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Natty Guard 18D, and it's really not that much of an understatement. You really just have to be stubborn enough to put up with the suck and be marginally more intelligent than most infantrymen. Unfortunately a lot of SF's current deployments could be done by less qualified people. Quality is really ODA dependent too. I definitely occasionally encounter r-slurs that make you wonder how they got through selection and the Q.

But as an anonymous account you of course don't know if I'm just larping, and I comment too much shit that would kill my security clearance on here to post proof

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Did you see the part in the report where that company did the trick where they make a super fricking small battery to get unreasonably high efficiency per volume? Pretty funny stuff.

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I did. It's very crafty from a business perspective, but dumbass shit like this sets back investment in less r-slurred companies that might actually create something useful. That said venture capitalists are half r-slurred and throw money at anything with enough technical buzzwords

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Never trusted a black box, that's why I don't have s*x with black women

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NTA

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More for me

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