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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Advancements like what the company promised are huge. Right now, in the energy space, it is a lot less about creating energy, and more about storing energy, especially when it comes to grid technologies. Between Hydro, wind, and to a lesser degree, solar, we generally have everything covered. The problem lies with demand: Most of the time, demand is less than supply, so surplus supply is simply wasted. If we had an efficient way to store this excess, when peak demand is met, we could draw from this stored energy, rather than less optimal measures, such as rolling outages, which happens in some areas.
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The virgin "advanced battery technology" vs the "Chad Reservoir"
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Awww yes, the good old method of using excess energy to pump water up hill, and then when demand exceeds supply, allow the water to flow back down, utilizing gravity to convert the potential energy into kinetic energy.
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Batteries
Lake Chad
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Put the Adderall down, sir
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IβM ON A ROLL TODAY
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pumped storage is the shit.
only power storage you can increase with a backho
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Isn't there a dune in Michigan that does this? Any why doesn't every town have gigantic sand dunes next to immense lakes?
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Nobody is going to store surplus energy in Li-whatever batteries, they cost way too much. All plausible solutions to that problem look like pumping water up the Hoover Dam because you can store energy in a million tons of water without having to make all that water from rare earth elements.
What they are trying to do is to improve the dismal energy density ratios between gasoline and batteries in power-hungry applications such as cars. Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density: Gasoline: 46.4 MJ/kg, Lithium-ion battery 0.36β0.875 MJ/kg. Improving that value is not a global game changer but it would have improved things a lot, which it wouldn't because I trust
@FrozenChosen's feminine skill of detecting an LVM trying to fake it till he makes it (which is never).
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tesla powerwall does exactly that, and it's just as r-slurred as you can imagine.
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Shut up nerd
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