Senate candidate Nate Morris says his business, Rubicon, was a success. Was it?
By John Cheves
Nate Morris never ran for public office until this year, so he has little in the way of a political record to share with voters.
Instead, as a Republican candidate for Kentucky’s U.S. Senate seat up for grabs in 2026, Morris sells himself as a successful business executive, the founder of a high-tech “digital waste” company called Rubicon that paid off big for all involved.
Starting in 2009, Morris — along with his partners — did indeed build a company called Rubicon Global, later Rubicon Technologies. Its software helped clients cut costs by analyzing and reducing their waste streams.
But Rubicon never made a profit during all that time.
Its stock dropped as soon as the company went public. In less than two years, the New York Stock Exchange removed Rubicon because of its valuation losses. The company suffered through layoffs, churn in the executive suites and a frequent scramble for more capital and debt refinancing.
Today, an unhappy group of early Rubicon shareholders says the company is under the control of Mexican investors who bailed it out. They are demanding more than $330 million in compensation as a result. That claim is in arbitration. Their representative declined to be interviewed for this story.
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He exited with a compensation package worth $40.9 million and sold all his stock in the company.
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So, was Rubicon the success that Morris claims?
Morris insists it was. He’s a millionaire thanks to Rubicon and lives with his family on a 14-acre horse farm outside Lexington that he purchased four years ago.
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If he had to do it all over again, he wouldn’t change a thing, Morris said.
“I stand by everything we did 100%”
Stumbling on Wall Street
Rubicon’s biggest fumble probably was how it went public in 2022.
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Rubicon, with Morris as CEO, went the SPAC route. It merged with an entity known as Founder SPAC and declared for itself a valuation of $1.7 billion.
Unfortunately for Rubicon, not everyone agreed it was worth $1.7 billion.
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Rubicon’s stock dropped from an opening day price of $7.55 per share to $6 by the closing bell. It kept dropping to about $1 by the time Morris resigned two months later.
In June 2024, 19 months after that, the New York Stock Exchange delisted Rubicon and suspended its share trading. The NYSE said the company’s average market capitalization fell below $15 million for 30 consecutive days.
Rubicon disputed that valuation, but it was ejected from the stock exchange.
Read the full article from the Herald Leader here. |
