Let’s Check in on Supermicro, the Target of Bloomberg’s ‘The Big Hack’

Thursday, 18 May 2023

Kim Ahlberg, posting on Mastodon:

Putting some money into SMCI after reading @gruber’s posts calling out Bloomberg¹ on their bullshit story has been a good move so far…

¹ Bloomberg, of course, is the publication that published “The Big Hack” in October 2018 — a sensational story alleging that data centers of Apple, Amazon, and dozens of other companies were compromised by China’s intelligence services. The story presented no confirmable evidence at all.

Supermicro (SMCI) was the company whose server motherboards Bloomberg alleged were compromised by rogue chips designed to surreptitiously phone home to Chinese intelligence servers. Bloomberg presented zero actual evidence then, and five years later, zero evidence of such rogue chips has been found. Every company Bloomberg alleged was compromised flatly denied the report. Bloomberg has never retracted the report, thus forever tarnishing their journalistic integrity. Here’s my first report on the story, and this search should get you to my follow-ups.

When Bloomberg published their spectacular but seemingly completely false report, Supermicro’s stock price plummeted by almost half, from $21.50 to $11.65 per share.

I can’t believe I never thought to follow-up on their share price, given my years-long zealotry reminding people, via footnotes in other reports from Bloomberg, that “The Big Hack” was by all available evidence complete bullshit, yet never retracted.

Turns out Supermicro has done OK in the intervening years. Their stock closed today at $164.56 — over 14 times higher than it was after “The Big Hack” dropped. That’s a tidy return for Ahlberg and anyone else who invested similarly. What a nice postscript to a disgraceful story.