Hindenburg is back in the headlines after last week accusing Indian conglomerate Adani Group of a brazen stock manipulation and accounting fraud scheme. It cited two years of research, including talks with former Adani senior executives and reviews of thousands of documents.

The Adani Group has blasted the accusations, calling them a malicious combination of selective misinformation and stale, baseless and discredited allegations that have been tested and rejected by Indias highest courts.

Nevertheless, Hindenburgs scorching allegations have caused the fortune of Adani Groups founder, Gautam Adani, to slide by more than $34 billion in just a week, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires index. Heres a look at the firm behind all the movement:

What is it?

Hindenburg says it specializes in forensic financial research. In laymans terms, it looks for corruption or fraud in the business world, such as accounting irregularities and bad actors in management.

Where did its name come from?

The firm says it sees the Hindenburg, the airship that famously caught fire in the 1930s to the cry of Oh, the humanity, as the epitome of a totally man-made, totally avoidable disaster. It says it looks for similar disasters in financial markets before they lure in more unsuspecting victims.

Who else has Hindenburg gone after?

Its perhaps most famous for a 2020 report on Nikola, a company in the electric-vehicle industry whose founder Hindenburg said made misleading claims to ink partnerships with top auto companies hungry to catch up to Tesla.

Among its allegations, Hindenburg accused Nikola of staging a video to calm skepticism about its truck, one that showed the vehicle cruising on a road. Hindenburg said the video was actually just showing the truck rolling down a hill after getting towed to the top.

What has come of such accusations?

For Nikola, quick scrutiny from the government and investors.

The company and its founder, Trevor Milton, received grand jury subpoenas from the U.S Attorneys office for the Southern District of New York and the N.Y. County District Attorneys Office shortly after Hindenburg released its report.

The Securities and Exchange Commission also soon issued subpoenas to Nikolas directors.

Milton was convicted this past October of charges he deceived investors with exaggerated claims about his companys progress in producing zero-emission 18-wheel trucks fueled by electricity or hydrogen.

And Nikola in late 2021 agreed to pay $125 million to settle SEC charges that it defrauded investors by misleading them about its products, technical advancements, and commercial prospects.

What does Hindenburg get out of this?

It can make money. In its Adani report, it said that it had taken a short position in Adani Group Companies through bonds that trade in the U.S. and other investments that trade outside India.

It has made similar short bets against other companies it published unflattering reports on. A short trade is a way for someone to make money if an investments price falls. Afterward, if the price of a companys stock or bonds falls because of the negative attention from the report, Hindenburg can profit.

Such short sellers have been criticized for unfairly pushing down prices of stocks with potentially unfounded allegations. But proponents also call them a healthy part of a stock market, keeping stock prices in check and preventing them from running too high.

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House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has been eager to flex Republican power to remove the Minnesota Democrat after he blocked two other Democrats, Rep. Adam Schiff and Rep. Eric Swalwell, from rejoining the House Intelligence Committee once the GOP took control of the chamber in the new Congress.

Votes could come as soon as Wednesday on the resolution against Omar, a Somali immigrant and Muslim lawmaker who has apologized for comments she has said she came to understand were viewed as antisemitic.

This is about vengeance. This is about spite. This is about politics, said Rep. James McGovern of Massachusetts, the top Democrat on the Rules Committee, as Republicans called a hurried meeting late Tuesday to consider the resolution.

McGovern argued that Democrats had removed Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., and Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz., for remarks that were far more extreme and violent against fellow lawmakers than those Omar had made and apologized for.

The resolution against Omar was proposed by Rep. Max Miller, R-Ohio, a former official in the Trump administration. It says that Omars comments have brought dishonor to the House of Representatives and she should be removed from the Foreign Affairs Committee.

McCarthy has strained to ensure he has enough support from his Republican ranks to oust Omar. Republicans command a slim majority and several GOP lawmakers have been reluctant to engage in tit-for-tat retribution against colleagues.

But GOP leaders moved ahead late Tuesday with the resolution against Omar after several holdouts signaled their support.

The action against Omar pushed ahead after embattled Republican Rep. George Santos announced earlier Tuesday he would be stepping aside from his own committee assignments as the House Ethics Committee investigates his actions. The New York Republican has acknowledged embellishments about his education, work experience and other aspects of his personal and professional life.

Several Republicans have been wary of taking action against Omar while they are also having to answer for the many questions emerging about Santos.

No vote has been set on the resolution against Omar, but it could come as soon as Wednesday, aides said. Republicans said they are waiting for Democrats to formally nominate Omar to the Foreign Affairs Committee, on which she served in the last Congress. Once the committee roster is approved by the whole House, the Republicans would move to strip her of the seat.

With his slim majority, McCarthy acknowledged at the start of the week that member absences were having an impact on his ability to schedule the vote.

Omar told CNN in an interview Sunday that the move against her is politically motivated.

Its motivated by the fact that many of these members dont believe a Muslim, a refugee, an African should even be in Congress, let alone have the opportunity to serve on the Foreign Affairs Committee, she said.

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Thats the conclusion from her annual Big Ideas report published on Tuesday by her money management firm. This 153-page deep dive attempts to handicap the potential commercial opportunities awaiting those startups and incumbents quick to embrace promising new technologies set to supplant older, obsolete ones.

After casting her eye on everything from smart crypto contracts to orbital aerospace, Wood believes companies that succeed in disrupting existing industries will experience super-exponential growth, lifting their cumulative value by an average annual rate of 40% in the process to reach a staggering $200 trillion by 2030.

To put that gargantuan figure into perspective, the International Monetary Fund estimated last April that the size of the entire worlds economy would cross the $100 trillion mark in nominal GDP terms by the end of the year.

The market value associated with disruptive innovation could account for the majority of the global equity market capitalization, the report concluded. 

Woods team identifies 14 distinct technologies they believe will feed off each other, broadly converging into five overarching investment themes (innovation platforms) grouped around artificial intelligence, robotics, energy storage, public blockchains and the multi-omic sequencing of digitalized biological data. 

Courtesy of ARK Investment Management LLC

Underpinning them all in their view are the advancements currently being made in the field of deep neural networks.

A form of machine learning that improves the more data they are fed, their ability to train over time allows them to extrapolate and infer outcomes with increasing accuracy much the same way a human being would. 

These artificial brains, which power innovations like OpenAIs ChatGPT, could quadruple the productivity of knowledge workers by the end of the decade, according to ARK Invest.

Breakthroughs associated with energy storage and robotics alone could add 30% to real GDP by 2030, it wrote, and AI could dwarf both their contributions.

ARK Invest takes a different approach from Wall Streetbut its risks are high

Wood is something of a tech guru who is notable for her early, accurate predictions of Teslas extraordinary bull run that once earned it a $1 trillion valuation towards the tail end of 2021.

Importantly her firm doesnt employ your typical Wall Street analyst.

Instead of emphasizing spreadsheets and valuation models that often focus on short-term fundamentals like a companys forward-year cash flow or earnings per share, her ARK Invest research team prefers a top-down analysis of what macroeconomic problems inhibit social progress before examining which innovators are doing the most to solve them.

Much of the research conclusions in Big Ideas is based on predicting when technologies may reach mass market maturity by employing Wrights Law, a general theory from 1936 that attempts to model cost degradation curves over time. Wood borrows so heavily from it in her research that it features a very own web page on her ARK Invest site.

Since the report takes a helicopter view of the broader tech sector, it doesnt come with the usual recommendations of which individual stocks it believes investors should buy or sell. 

But Woods is known to favor companies like Tesla that offer exposure to several different disruptive innovations at once, such as electric vehicles, energy storage, robotics and artificial intelligence. 

Given her emphasis on investing early in emerging technologies that are often untested commercially, the risks inherent in her differently-themed exchange-traded funds are high both to the upside as well as the downside. 

In 2022, the worst year for U.S. stocks since the global financial crisis, her eight ETFs each lost anywhere between a third to two-thirds of their value.

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