Investors searching for Mullen Automotive today will find a company that barely resembles what went public in 2021. Different name, no Nasdaq listing, a subsidiary that has shut down, and a court-appointed receiver overseeing what remains. The story is not a simple bankruptcy — it’s a slow, documented collapse that unfolded across several years.
This article walks through the full timeline: what Mullen was, how the money disappeared, why vehicle deliveries meant almost nothing, and what the receivership and subsidiary closure actually signal about the company’s future.
What Mullen Automotive Was and What It Became
Mullen Automotive launched as an American electric vehicle company headquartered in Brea, California. It went public through a SPAC deal in 2021, positioning itself as a legitimate competitor in the EV space. Its product lineup included several models — the Mullen One, Mullen Three, Mullen Go, Mullen Campus, and Mullen GT — most of which were rebadged imports from Chinese manufacturers rather than originally designed vehicles.
In June 2025, Mullen Automotive formally changed its name to Bollinger Innovations, Inc., trading under the ticker BINI. The company became the parent of Bollinger Motors, a Michigan-based electric truck startup it had acquired. So when people search “Mullen Automotive” today, the corporate entity they’re looking for no longer exists under that name.
The name change did not fix the underlying problems. It was a rebranding applied to a company already in serious financial trouble.
The Numbers That Tell the Real Story
The financial figures here are not close calls. For the 12 months ending September 30, 2024, the company reported a loss of $506 million on just $1 million in revenue, with only $10 million in cash left on hand. Those numbers are not a typo.
Since going public in 2021 through 2024, the company burned through roughly $450 million in negative free cash flow. Total recognized revenue from vehicle sales over that entire period came to approximately $465,000. To put that plainly: hundreds of millions of dollars spent, less than half a million dollars earned from actually selling cars.
By Q1 2025, things had not improved. The company still reported an operating loss of around $66 million and negative free cash flow of $25 million for that single quarter. Cash reserves had dropped from $10 million to approximately $1.4 million in a short window — a sign of accelerating insolvency rather than stabilization.
According to analysis from the YouTube channel Broken Business Models, which reviewed publicly available filings, Mullen was losing an estimated $60,000 per vehicle sold in Q1 2025. Every sale made the financial situation worse, not better.
Mullen’s Sales Record — What “Deliveries” Actually Meant
One of the most misleading parts of Mullen’s story involves the gap between vehicle deliveries and actual sales. These are not the same thing, and the difference explains why revenue figures look so disconnected from delivery announcements.
In the nine months ending June 30, 2024, Mullen delivered 377 vehicles to dealerships and invoiced $16.8 million. On paper, that sounds like meaningful activity. In practice, the company’s dealership contracts reportedly allowed dealers to return unsold vehicles after one year. Under accounting rules, Mullen could only recognize revenue when a final customer actually bought the car.
In that same nine-month period, only 3 vehicles reached actual end customers. That produced $198,600 in recognized revenue — not $16.8 million. According to Broken Business Models’ analysis of the company’s filings, since going public through mid-2024, only 28 vehicles total had been confirmed sold to end customers.
Think of it this way: shipping boxes to a store is not the same as selling the product inside. When the store can send every box back unsold, the “shipment” was never really a sale at all. That’s effectively what was happening with Mullen’s deliveries.
Reverse Stock Splits, Dilution, and What Happened to the Share Price
To stay listed on Nasdaq, a company must maintain a minimum stock price of $1 per share for at least 10 consecutive trading days. Mullen’s share price kept falling below that threshold, so the company repeatedly used reverse stock splits to push the number back up.
A reverse split doesn’t add value — it just consolidates shares. If you hold 100 shares worth $0.10 each, a 1-for-100 reverse split leaves you with 1 share worth $10. The math looks better. The underlying value is unchanged. And if the company keeps losing money, the price falls again anyway.
Mullen executed multiple reverse splits, including one at a ratio of 1-for-100, effective June 2, 2025 — confirmed by an official company press release via GlobeNewswire. Earlier splits reportedly reached ratios as high as 1-for-250. According to Broken Business Models’ analysis, since the end of 2022, the company’s share count increased by more than 8 million times through repeated dilutive capital raises. That level of dilution essentially destroys the value held by early investors, even without a formal bankruptcy.
The splits bought time. They did not solve the problem. Nasdaq delisted the company in October 2025 after it failed to maintain the required minimum bid price. Following delisting, shares moved to OTC markets, where they reportedly traded at fractions of a cent — effectively negligible value for most shareholders.
Receivership, Subsidiary Closure, and the Current State
The final sequence of events makes it difficult to describe Mullen/Bollinger Innovations as a functioning business in any meaningful sense.
In November 2025, Bollinger Motors — the electric truck subsidiary and the main remaining operational piece of the company — ceased operations. According to reporting by FreightWaves, the closure was communicated through internal company emails, with staff reductions and the closing of the Troy, Michigan office confirmed.
In January 2026, Bollinger Innovations (formerly Mullen Automotive) was placed into receivership. Receivership means a court-appointed receiver takes control of the company’s assets and operations, typically to protect creditors. It is not identical to a Chapter 7 or Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing — those involve a formal federal court process — but the practical effect is similar. The company is no longer operating under normal management, and creditors, not shareholders, are the priority.
No formal bankruptcy filing has been confirmed in the available sources. But the combination of delisting, subsidiary closure, and receivership leaves little room for optimism about the company’s future as a going concern.
What This Means for Shareholders
For retail investors who bought MULN shares expecting EV growth, the outcome has been severe. The stock that once attracted speculative interest now trades on OTC markets at sub-$0.0005 per share, according to EBC.com’s coverage of the collapse. That’s less than a fraction of a penny.
The losses were not just from bad luck. The structure of the company — repeated dilutive raises, reverse splits to mask declining share price, minimal real customer demand, and losses that grew faster than any revenue — meant that shareholder value was being eroded at each step. Many retail investors who held through the splits ended up with a smaller number of shares worth far less than their original investment.
For anyone still holding shares or wondering about recovery: the receivership, delisting, and subsidiary closure are serious structural obstacles, not temporary setbacks. There is no visible path back to Nasdaq or to meaningful vehicle production based on current information.
What the Mullen Story Reveals About EV Startups
Mullen’s collapse fits a broader pattern. Several EV startups that went public through SPACs around 2020–2022 have since failed, shrunk dramatically, or pivoted away from their original ambitions. Easy capital and EV enthusiasm created space for companies that lacked genuine demand, viable unit economics, or a realistic path to profitability.
Mullen’s case is particularly stark because the numbers were so extreme — 28 total end-customer sales over several years, $506 million in annual losses, and a gross loss on each vehicle sold. These aren’t signs of a company struggling to scale. They’re signs of a business model that never worked at any scale.
For investors considering speculative positions in EV startups, the Mullen story offers a straightforward lesson: deliveries to dealers are not the same as sales, and a rising share price after a reverse split does not mean the business is recovering. BusinessBaseMag has covered similar cautionary cases across the broader startup and small-cap space.
The Bottom Line
Mullen Automotive, now officially Bollinger Innovations, is not technically bankrupt in the formal legal sense — no Chapter 7 or Chapter 11 filing has been confirmed. But it has been delisted from Nasdaq, placed into receivership, and its primary operating subsidiary has shut down. Those facts, combined with years of catastrophic losses and near-zero revenue, point to a company that is functionally finished.
For anyone who lost money in MULN, the outcome is painful but not surprising in retrospect. The warning signs were visible in the financial filings for years. The broader lesson is that hype, a public listing, and a stream of press releases about vehicle deliveries are no substitute for actual paying customers.
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