'Us' and 'them'
XLFleet is being sold on a "blue-sky" story, with exponential growth in sales estimates, Block said, justified by a $1.4 billion sales estimate in 2024 that he called "a joke."
In talking to former employees, the hedge fund has found this estimate has been created using an order backlog worth $200 million, he said.
"That backlog is greatly misrepresented. I mean maybe even to the point where you call it an outright lie," he said, adding: "We can extrapolate that this $1.4 billion is just farcical."
He said: "What we learned from talking with three former salespeople is that they keep track of leads in Salesforce. If they have an initial call, they're told by their sales managers to put in an exaggerated probability of that closing, along with a really optimistic — to the point of being ludicrous — number of potential units."