'It's my fault': An early Nikola investor says the startup went public too soon as it grapples with accusations of fraud

• A Nikola investor and board member is defending the startup against fraud accusations from a short-seller that have caused its stock to sink dramatically.
• Jeffrey Ubben, who founded the investment firm Value Act, says the startup went public too quickly.
• The real story, he told Bloomberg and the Financial Times, is in Nikola's plans for hydrogen fuel infrastructure — not in past missteps.

A member of Nikola's board of directors, early investor Jeffrey Ubben, is doing damage control after a wild week for the electric startup.

In interviews with the Financial Times and Bloomberg, Ubben said he pressed the company to go public sooner than later. The choice to accelerate that June listing helped the company's market value to skyrocket, precipitating a slew of similar reverse mergers, but came with its own issues, Ubben said.

"We are doing something for the first time," he told Bloomberg. "I guess you're seeing how the sausage is made, and we went public way too early and it's my fault. I pushed Trevor to do it."

In the months since Nikola entered its second, larger, and much more public phase of life, it seemed to cement itself as a power player in a crowded field. A non-cash deal worth some $2 billion with General Motors helped its market value surge even further before a damning report from a short-seller dampened the stock's gains.

In response to the numerous allegations of lies and fraud, Nikola has promised legal action, welcoming regulatory intervention. While it disputed most accusations, it also admitted to some while disagreeing with the characterizations by Hindenburg Research. Rolling a truck down a hill in order to film a commercial, for instance, wasn't fraud in Nikola's eyes because it never claimed the truck was operating under its own power.

Ubben didn't directly address any specifics of the fight in either interview. However, he expressed frustration in a focus on past actions, instead of Nikola's vision for the future and its own growth.

"How can this be an intricate fraud if you have your three biggest suppliers in the board room working together as partners? I don't get why there's so much suspicion," Ubben told Bloomberg. "You think Bosch, CNH, Hanwha and now General Motors? They just rolled over without doing due diligence? No."

Despite a bevy of truck offerings coming down the pipe, including a consumer-level truck that will eventually compete with the Ford F-150, Ubben says the real value of Nikola is in the hydrogen-fueling infrastructure it hopes the build.

"We are different from Tesla," Ubben told the Financial Times. "They are going to make their money on cars and trucks. That's a tough model. We will be selling fuel to all the other hydrogen vehicles. It is the end-game solution."

Messaging, however, hasn't been the company's strong point, he said. That's something even Wall Street analysts have bristled at.

"It turns out our business model, to be a system integrator, is not well understood," Ubben continued to the FT. "And that is a problem."