The business environment for foreign companies in China can be summed up in one word, challenging.

Here are the full Wall Street Journal series, the state of Xi's Chinese dream, all in one place,

on WSJ Special Access, only for subscribers and only on Spotify.

From the Wall Street Journal, this is Bad Bats, I'm Ben Foldy.

In the last episode, the Hindenburg team was almost done crafting its report on Nikola.

The team was preparing to put its research on the line. Could it convince the market that Trevor Milton was a liar?

This episode tells the story of that report's release, and the strange events that followed,

including a confrontation involving secret recordings and private eyes. We'll get to that.

We should note, after his conviction in October on federal fraud charges, both Trevor and his lawyers have pledged to keep fighting.

They haven't answered any of our questions for this podcast.

Nikola said, after Trevor's conviction, that it was pleased to move on and focus on executing its business strategy.

I'm going to start this episode with what became the most explosive detail in the Hindenburg report.

A detail that meant solving one of Nikola's biggest mysteries.

How did it make a truck that couldn't drive? Zoomed down a highway.

That mystery had long puzzled Paul Lackey, the engineer from Oregon, who helped build that truck.

Nikola's first prototype, the Nikola 1. About a year after the big unveiling of that truck,

Paul saw a video that he says left him bewildered.

It was a video posted on the Nikola company Twitter account back in January of 2018.

The tweet read, quote, behold, the Nikola 1 in motion, end quote.

It showed the truck cruising down a desert highway. We mentioned this moment in episode 3.

My first thought was, did they get that thing working?

In the video, it sure looked like they did. The gleaming white trucks seemed to be barreling down the two-lane road,

...