Founder of muckraking financial information firm Hindenburg Research calls it quits

BANGKOK -- Nate Anderson, the founder of the muckraking financial information firm Hindenburg Research, says he is disbanding the organization after it finished the pipeline of work it set out to do.

Hindenburg, founded in 2017, has a track record of sending the stock prices of its targets tumbling by disclosing fraud and other abuses that it has unearthed through deep forensic financial research. It had a financial incentive to do so, using a trading technique called short-selling to make money if its reports caused stock and bond prices of its targeted companies to fall.

In one of its dozens of projects, it focused on the Indian conglomerate Adani Group, accusing it of “a brazen stock manipulation and accounting fraud scheme.” Hindenburg cited two years of research, including talks with former Adani senior executives and reviews of thousands of documents. Adani has challenged the allegations, which caused share prices of its group companies to plunge.

In another case, Hindenburg Research questioned the number of pre-orders that startup electric truck maker Lordstown Motors had reported for its Endurance model, leading to a shakeup in its management. The automaker has been struggling and sold a huge auto assembly plant in Ohio to Taiwan iPhone manufacturer Foxconn to alleviate its financial woes.

Anderson said in a letter posted in X, or Twitter, late Wednesday that he was “writing this from a place of joy,” but that Hindenburg was a chapter in his life, “not a central thing that defines me.”

He said there was no specific reason for choosing to quit, though the intensity and focus of the work had come at the cost of missing people and experiences. The next step is to work on providing open source information about how Hindenburg conducted its investigations, he said.

“To my family and friends, I'm sorry for the times I have ignored you while I let my attention be drawn away. I can't wait to have more time to share with you together,” he said.

Anderson said he would work to ensure the people on his team would “land where they want to be next.” Some plan to start their own research firm, which he will not be involved with. Some others will be “free agents.”

He said that nearly 100 people had faced criminal or civil charges by regulators at least partly due to Hindenburg’s work, which focused on accounting irregularities, illegal or unethical business or financial reporting practices and other undisclosed regulatory, product or financial issues.

One of its most famous reports was a 2020 expose on Nikola, a company in the electric-vehicle industry whose founder Hindenburg said made misleading claims to ink partnerships with top auto companies hungry to catch up to Tesla.

Among its allegations, Hindenburg accused Nikola of staging a video to calm skepticism about its truck, one that showed the vehicle cruising on a road. Hindenburg said the video was actually just showing the truck rolling down a hill after getting towed to the top.

In late 2021, Nikola agreed to pay $125 million to settle Securities and Exchange Commission charges that it defrauded investors by misleading them about its products, technical advancements, and commercial prospects.

Anderson praised his team of 11 people who he said are smart, focused and “very nice and polite,” but at the same time are “ruthless assassins, capable of world-class work.”

The firm says it sees the Hindenburg, the airship that famously caught fire in the 1930s to the cry of “Oh, the humanity,” as the “epitome of a totally man-made, totally avoidable disaster.” It says it looks for similar disasters in financial markets “before they lure in more unsuspecting victims.”

“Over time, people began to see what I hoped we could show — that having an impact is possible, no matter who you are,” Anderson wrote.