Mullen Automotive was once pitched as a serious contender in the electric vehicle race. By late 2025, its core truck unit had shut its doors, its stock had been removed from Nasdaq, and shares were trading at fractions of a cent over the counter.
So is Mullen Automotive going out of business? The honest answer is: it has largely already failed — even if the legal paperwork hasn’t fully caught up yet. Here’s a factual breakdown of what happened, what the numbers reveal, and what it means for anyone still watching this stock.
What Mullen Automotive Was and What It Became
Mullen Automotive is a California-based EV startup that went public through a reverse merger with a company called Net Element. Its pitch covered a wide range: commercial vans, fleet vehicles, electric trucks, and SUVs under the Mullen and Bollinger Motors brands.
In mid-2025, the company announced a plan to merge with its subsidiary Bollinger Motors and rebrand as Bollinger Innovations, Inc., with a new Nasdaq ticker. At the same time, it cut 155 positions and projected more than $35 million in operating expense reductions.
That might sound like a strategic pivot. It wasn’t. It was a cost-cutting restructuring done under severe financial pressure — a company trying to survive, not grow.
The Real Sales Numbers Behind the EV Startup Story
The most damning part of Mullen’s story isn’t the stock price. It’s the actual sales figures.
Since going public, the company sold fewer than 30 vehicles to real end customers. Total recognized revenue came in under $465,000. For a public company that raised hundreds of millions of dollars, those numbers are nearly impossible to defend.
Here’s a concrete example of how bad it got. In the nine-month period ending June 30, 2024, Mullen delivered 377 vehicles to dealerships and invoiced $16.8 million. But under standard accounting rules, only 3 of those vehicles were actually sold to end customers. That meant the company could only recognize $198,600 in GAAP revenue.
Why such a gap? When dealers can return unsold vehicles after a certain period — typically one year — the company cannot book that sale as revenue until the dealer actually sells to a buyer. Mullen was shipping cars to lots, but those cars weren’t moving to real customers.
By early 2025, the situation hadn’t improved. One quarter showed $5 million in revenue paired with a $2 million gross loss — meaning the company lost roughly $60,000 on every vehicle it managed to sell. Since going public, cumulative negative free cash flow reached approximately $450 million.
Reverse Stock Splits, Dilution, and a Stock Worth Fractions of a Cent
To understand what happened to Mullen’s stock, you need to understand two things: reverse splits and dilution.
Nasdaq requires listed companies to keep their share price above $1. When a stock falls below that, the company faces delisting. One way to stay compliant — at least temporarily — is a reverse stock split.
In June 2025, Mullen executed a 1-for-100 reverse split. That shrunk the share count from roughly 80 million down to about 800,000. Think of it like swapping 100 one-dollar bills for a single $100 bill. You have fewer pieces of paper, but you’re not richer. The total value doesn’t change. It’s a cosmetic fix, not a real one.
The deeper problem was dilution. Since the end of 2022, Mullen’s share count had increased more than 8 million-fold through repeated capital raises. Every time the company needed cash, it issued more shares. That process systematically wiped out the value held by earlier investors.
Cash on hand dropped from $10 million to $1.4 million between two consecutive reporting periods. The company was burning through what little it had left.
By October 2025, even the reverse split wasn’t enough. The company — now operating as Bollinger Innovations — was removed from Nasdaq entirely. Shares moved to over-the-counter (OTC) markets, where they now trade under the symbol MULN at under $0.0005 per share.
If Nasdaq is like a regulated shopping mall with strict entry requirements, OTC markets are more like side-street kiosks. Shares can still technically trade, but there are fewer buyers, less oversight, and it’s much harder to exit a position without taking a significant loss. For most common shareholders, the equity is effectively worthless.
Bollinger Motors Closed
On November 21, 2025, Bollinger Motors — the Michigan-based EV truck unit — ceased operations. Company emails to staff reportedly stated: “We are to officially close the doors of Bollinger Motors, effective today, Nov. 21, 2025.”
The parent company, Bollinger Innovations, also began closing its Troy, Michigan office and reducing its workforce further. The truck business, which was supposed to be a key part of Mullen’s commercial EV strategy, is gone.
This is an important distinction: closing a business unit is not the same as filing for bankruptcy. A company can be economically finished — no revenue, no customers, shuttered offices — without having filed Chapter 11 or Chapter 7 paperwork. Think of a restaurant that stops serving food, lays off its staff, and locks the doors. It has effectively failed, even if the owners haven’t gone to court yet.
That’s where Mullen/Bollinger Innovations stands right now. The core truck operation is shut down. The stock is off Nasdaq and nearly valueless. No formal bankruptcy filing has been publicly confirmed for the parent company, but the financial and operational picture is about as bleak as it gets.
What the Financial Risk Metrics Show
Financial modeling puts Mullen’s probability of bankruptcy at around 96%. For context, that’s not a borderline case — that’s about as high as these models go. The company also carries a negative return on assets of roughly -85%, meaning it’s destroying value, not creating it.
A 96% bankruptcy probability is like a weather forecast calling for a 96% chance of a severe storm. You wouldn’t plan anything important around it. For investors still holding shares, that number reflects the actual risk level — not speculation, but a quantitative signal backed by the company’s own financial data.
Cumulative net losses since 2021 have exceeded $500 million according to SEC filings. The company burned through enormous amounts of capital and produced almost nothing in return from a commercial standpoint.
The Securities Class Action
There’s one more piece of the Mullen story that affected shareholders: a securities class action lawsuit. The case, known as In re Mullen Automotive Securities Litigation, covered investors from June 15, 2020 to April 17, 2022. Claimants alleged they were misled by the company’s public statements during that period.
A settlement was reached, with a claim deadline of April 25, 2025 for eligible investors. The settlement does not represent a legal finding of fraud — but it does reflect that investors felt the company’s public communications were misleading, and that those claims had enough merit to result in a payout.
If you held shares during that class period and haven’t looked into the settlement, that window has now closed.
Is There Any Path Forward?
Based on the available evidence, there is no realistic path to recovery that the data supports. The truck unit is closed. The stock is off Nasdaq and trading at a fraction of a penny. The company has burned through roughly $450–500 million in cash with almost nothing to show in actual sales. Financial distress models show a near-certain probability of bankruptcy.
Mullen’s story fits a pattern that has played out across the EV startup space: heavy reliance on speculative capital markets, aggressive public promises, and little to no real customer demand. Many smaller EV companies have faced the same outcome as interest rates rose and the easy capital of 2020–2021 dried up.
For anyone considering a position in Bollinger Innovations/MULN on the OTC market, this is not a turnaround play — it is a distressed penny stock with one of the highest modeled bankruptcy risks available. For former shareholders, the class action window has passed, and OTC shares carry minimal liquidity. Getting out of a position at a meaningful price would be difficult.
If you want to track stories like this and understand the business mechanics behind public company collapses, Start Business Review covers these cases with the same focus on facts over hype.
The Bottom Line
Mullen Automotive is not officially bankrupt as of this writing, but it has effectively failed as a business. Its core operating unit shut down in November 2025. Its stock was kicked off Nasdaq and now trades at near-zero. It never built meaningful commercial demand, and it burned through hundreds of millions of dollars in the process.
Whether or not a formal bankruptcy filing follows, the business outcome is already clear. The EV race has room for a limited number of survivors, and Mullen was not one of them.
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