Why did the US short-seller Hindenburg Research shut shop? Was it on account of real or perceived pressures and apprehensions of doom and despair? Or was it simply because the firm’s founder Nathan (Nate) Anderson and his 11 colleagues just wanted to move on, having achieved what they wanted less than eight years after they were incorporated, including stinging the corporate empire of Gautam Adani, one of the world’s richest men and a friend of Prime Minister Narendra Modi?
The answers to these questions would depend on which side you are on: the side of a 40-something son of a university professor and a nurse who made much more than just a mark on New York’s big, bad Wall Street, or the side of those who allege that he and his colleagues successfully wreaked economic havoc, if not financial terrorism, across the world, including in India. Let us parse the facts and claims so that you, dear reader, can arrive at your own conclusions.
Who is Nate Anderson?
On January 15, 2025, Anderson issued a 1,300-word personal note that Hindenburg Research was being wound up as “we finished the pipeline of ideas we were working on.” His exact birthdate not known, this well-educated Connecticut man worked for 10 months as an ambulance driver in Israel, acquired qualifications in international business, finance, and accounting, managed money for the rich, and then worked for his guru Harry Markopolos, who exposed the Bernie Madoff scandal in 2008. Anderson believed he could make money by exposing corporate corruption and becoming a whistleblower. He did.
Before that, he had more than his share of doubts and trepidation. To use his words: “I’m not a slick salesperson. I don’t know… the right clothes to wear. I can’t play golf. I’m not some superhuman that can function on 4 hours of sleep. In most of my jobs I was a good worker but mostly looked over. I had no money when I started—and after catching three lawsuits immediately out of the gate, I quickly had less than no money. I would have failed right at the starting line had it not been for the support of world-class whistleblower lawyer Bryan Wood, who took the cases on despite my lack of financial resources. I had a newborn child and was facing eviction at the time. I was terrified, but knew that if I stayed still I would crumble. The only option I had was to keep moving forward.”
Anderson went on to recount how he hired like-minded persons who investigated the financial misdemeanours of a slew of prominent corporate captains that led to civil or criminal charges being filed against nearly 100 of them, including billionaires and oligarchs, by regulatory authorities in the US and elsewhere. “We shook some empires that we felt needed shaking.”
Also Read | The latest chapter in the Adani stock imbroglio
He added that he was not winding up the firm he set up because of a “particular threat” or for health reasons or a “big personal issue.” Anderson said he would teach what he had learnt over an “adventure of a lifetime,” that is, over a period of just over seven years. His full statement is available online. He ended the note with a link to a song-and-dance video from Bali, Indonesia.
How Hindenburg Research got its name
A flying ship or zeppelin—named after Paul Von Hindenburg, the military leader of Germany who paved the way for the rise of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler—burst into flames in May 1937 in New Jersey before it could cross the Atlantic Ocean. As many as 35 passengers and crew members lost their lives in the accident.
Anderson chose this as the name of the firm he founded because he thought it epitomised a man-made, avoidable disaster. His firm would make money by short-selling stocks of companies found indulging in questionable, if not illegal and corrupt, practices.
What is short-selling?
Short-selling is a strategy through which a trader in financial assets profits from a fall in their prices. How? The trader borrows from a lender shares whose prices he believes will decline, then sells them, and later buys them back at a lower price to return to the lender thereby making a profit from the difference in prices. Theoretically, short-selling offers both high risks and high rewards. Hindenburg Research became a gambler who knew the outcome of the bets it placed.
Is short-selling legal in the US and in India? Answer: yes and no. In the US, there is a regulatory body, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, that enforces rules relating to short-selling by registered brokers. In this country, the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) prohibited short-selling between 2001 and 2008, then allowed it, and then banned it again for around eight months in 2020 during the pandemic.
The regulator of India’s financial markets, SEBI, has mandated that traders are required to identify short sales at the time of placing an order, and has made “naked” short-selling illegal, that is, taking short positions that exceed the actual number of tradable shares, and disallowed “day-trading” by institutional investors.
In December 2005, a SEBI committee put out a 20-page discussion paper on the topic that began this way: “Short selling—the sale of a security that the seller does not own—is one of the long-standing market practices, which has often been the subject of considerable debate and divergent views in most of the securities market across the world. The votaries of short selling consider it as a desirable and an essential feature of a securities market. The critics of short selling on the other hand are convinced that short selling, directly or indirectly, poses potential risks and can easily destabilise the market.”
What Hindenburg Research did
Interestingly, the first investigation by the short-selling firm published in August 2017 was on an Indian group, but not Adani. It was Eros, a Mumbai-based film production and distribution group run by the Lulla family.
Hindenburg Research subsequently probed and found frauds and illegalities in more than 75 corporate entities/groups. The last report, published as recently as January 2, 2025, was on the American online car dealer Carvana, titled “A Father-Son Accounting Grift For The Ages” (grift is petty or small-scale swindling).
The report on Carvana was based on 49 interviews with experts, former employees, competitors, and related parties. It gives an idea of how Hindenburg Research worked. It attracted attention by giving catchy headlines the way journalists do. Here is a sprinkling of examples from the 101 reports that can be read on the firm’s website. These involve corporate entities and persons from across the world.

Congress leader Rahul Gandhi, right, with Congress MPs donning the masks of Narendra Modi and Gautam Adani, at a protest demanding a probe into the bribery case involving the billionaire industrialist. New Delhi, December 9, 2024. | Photo Credit: PTI
In March 2018, it put out reports on the Aphria group, one of which was titled “A Shell Game with Cannabis on The Side”. In February 2024, a report was headlined, “Miracle Cures And Murder For Hire: How A Spoon-Bending Turkish Magician Built A $600 Million Nasdaq-Listed Scam On A Lifetime Of Lies” (Nasdaq stands for the National Association for Securities Dealers Automated Quotations, the world’s first and biggest electronic stock market).
Another report published in December 2021 was evocatively described thus: “Tecnoglass: Cocaine Cartel Connections, Undisclosed Family Deals, And Accounting Irregularities All In One Nasdaq SPAC”. The acronym SPAC stands for Special Purpose Acquisition Company.
The reports by Hindenburg Research indicted individuals and companies from not just the US and Canada but those from China, Kazakhstan, Nigeria, Sri Lanka, and Taiwan too.
Going after bigwigs
Among the big names called out was Nikola Corporation, the hydrogen and electric vehicle maker founded by Trevor Milton. After Hindenburg Research published its report on the company in September 2020, Milton resigned as executive chairman, was subsequently charged by the US Department of Justice (DoJ) and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), fined $1 million, and had to pay $168 million as restitution. He is in jail at the time of writing.
Another investigation published in May 2023 was the widely-diversified Icahn Enterprises, headed by Carl Icahn, who is close to the new US President, Donald Trump. Icahn has been described as one of America’s most successful hedge fund managers, corporate raiders, asset strippers, and Ponzi scheme operators. The last is a kind of fraud named after the Italian-origin Charles Ponzi, who in the 1920s, paid new investors with funds obtained from old investors. Similar schemes in India are called chit funds and money circulation schemes. The report on Icahn was headlined “The Corporate Raider Throwing Stones from His Own Glass House”.
In 2023, Hindenburg Research alleged that Block, founded by Jack Dorsey, who also set up Twitter, now X, had inflated the number of users it had and that its accounts were being used for illegal activities.
The short-seller once offered a “bounty” of a million dollars in October 2021 for information on a crypto-currency firm called Tether from potential whistleblowers. The persons and companies cutting across industries and countries accused of corruption have almost invariably first denied the allegations against them before being indicted by law-enforcement agencies. A case in point is the Adani Group.
Hindenburg Research stings Adani
Many in India had not heard of Hindenburg Research until January 2023 when it published a 30,000-word report provocatively titled “Adani Group: How the World’s Third Richest Man Is Pulling The Largest Con In Corporate History”. The report alleged that the group has “engaged in brazen stock manipulation and (an) accounting fraud scheme over the course of decades.” By the end of February that year, Hindenburg Research dared Adani to sue it—which has not happened yet—as the group’s stocks lost $150 billion in market capitalisation. Gautam Adani’s personal net worth collapsed, and he descended the rich list from position No. 3 to No. 30. (His ranking has since recovered).
His representatives described the short-seller’s report as a “calculated attack on India” as they, together with spokespersons of the Bharatiya Janata Party, draped themselves in the tricolour. Adani’s longer reply said the allegations were baseless and malicious. The response was in turn countered by the short-seller.

Hindenburg Research alleged that SEBI head Madhabi Puri Buch and her husband had stakes in “dubious offshore entities used to artificially inflate shares of Adani companies”. | Photo Credit: PTI
In July 2024, SEBI served a show-cause notice on Hindenburg Research accusing it of using “non-public” information to short Adani Group stocks. The short-seller pooh-poohed SEBI, and the following month, it released a second report, this time alleging that SEBI head Madhabi Puri Buch and her husband had stakes in “dubious offshore entities used to artificially inflate shares of Adani companies”.
While the couple denied accusations of “conflict of interest”, the short-seller wrote: “We find it unsurprising that SEBI was reluctant to follow a trail that may have led to its own chairperson.”
Also Read | Hindenburg puts SEBI chief under scanner over conflict of interest: All you need to know
In November 2024, this writer wrote a detailed article on how the DoJ and the SEC in the US had indicted Adani on charges of bribery and non-disclosure of information to investors while raising funds to obtain solar energy contracts in India. The indictment was based on an investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation that had seized the personal electronic devices of Gautam Adani’s nephew in the US. Adani has reportedly hired expensive lawyers to contest the charges before a court in Brooklyn, New York.
What critics of Hindenburg Research claim
The opposition Congress party’s spokesperson, Jairam Ramesh, said Hindenburg Research shutting down did not signify a clean chit for “Modani” and added: “The matter goes far deeper. It involves the abuse of Indian foreign policy to enrich the PM’s close friends at the expense of the national interest. It involves the misuse of investigative agencies to force Indian businesspersons to divest critical infrastructure assets and help Adani build monopolies in airports, ports, defence, and cement.”
On the other hand, the BJP and its supporters exulted. Senior Advocate and BJP MP Mahesh Jethmalani called Hindenburg Research’s decision a “run for cover” in light of its alleged connections with financier and philanthropist George Soros, the ruling party’s bogeyman. Jethmalani had earlier highlighted that Mark Kingdon, head of the US-based hedge fund Kingdon Capital Management, and his Chinese wife Anla Cheng, had access to the report on Adani by Hindenburg Research two months before it was released, thereby earning $4.1 million as profit that was then shared with the short-seller.
Advocate P.R. Ramesh said SEBI’s show-cause notice “could have played a role in the shutdown of Hindenburg Research” and called for a thorough investigation on whether there was a “conspiracy to deliberately destabilise Indian markets.” Former Chief Information Commissioner Y.K. Sinha claimed that there was “an agenda... to bring down reputed groups and companies...”
BJP spokesperson Shehzad Poonawalla alleged that the reports by Hindenburg Research were “sponsored, organised, orchestrated, and (a) manipulated act of economic anarchism and economic terrorism.” Former banker Ajay Bagga said Hindenburg Research operated in a legally ambiguous area, publishing negative reports on companies and simultaneously taking short positions against them. These activities often involved partnerships with hedge funds that did not disclose their positions, raising concerns about transparency and market manipulation. He added there is speculation that possible regulatory action might have played a role in Hindenburg Research deciding to shut down.
Meanwhile, on January 19, it was reported that a defamation lawsuit had been filed in Ontario on charges that Hindenburg Research had colluded with Anson Funds to manipulate the stock prices of Facedrive, a Canadian ride-sharing company.
The Hindenburg Research report against the Adani Group led to a political storm in early 2023. While the group’s stocks have recovered much of the losses incurred over the last year or so, the story is far from over. More media reports on Adani are in the offing.
How the legal cases in the US against the Indian oligarch will proceed remains to be seen. Time will also tell how Anderson will be judged in the court of history: as an activist, muck-raking whistleblower or as a person who profited by collaborating with greedy speculators.
The jury is out. In Donald Trump’s America and in Narendra Modi’s India. Wait for the next episode.
The writer is a senior journalist, author, publisher, maker of documentary films and music videos, and an occasional teacher. He is the only citizen of India against whom Adani’s lawyers have instituted six cases of defamation in various courts of law, five in Gujarat and one in Rajasthan, that are currently under adjudication. He is also the only Indian journalist named in the first Hindenburg Research report on Adani.
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