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 in financial markets that it has unearthed through deep 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 recent 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.
In another, 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.
