The Collapse of the EV SPACs: Another One Goes Bankrupt, Others on the Verge

SPACs were all the rage for a couple of years there, but now they’re blowing up, particularly EV SPACs. From Wolf Richter at wolfstreet.com:

The SPAC boom will surely go down in history as one of the biggest stock-market heists ever, made possible by Consensual Hallucination. 

EV maker Proterra, which makes mostly a few electric buses a year – when giant competitors make many thousands – filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy today, 25 months after having gone public via merger with a SPAC. It once had a market cap of nearly $4 billion.

It was by no means a record in terms of how long it took for an EV SPAC to go bankrupt; that record is held by Electric Last Mile Solutions, which took only 12 months to get it over with. EV maker Lordstown made the trip from SPAC merger to bankruptcy in a little over two-and-a-half years. The shares of other EV SPACS have totally collapsed, and most of them are headed for bankruptcy.

Proterra’s shares, or rather the SPAC’s shares before the merger, spiked after the merger was announced in January 2021 from around $10 to $31.06 and then began to collapse. Five days ago it was still at $2. Today, it plunged to 17 cents, down by 99.4% from the peak.

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