Trevor Milton's Nikola case dropped by SEC following Trump pardon

https://eletric-vehicles.com/nikola/trevor-miltons-nikola-case-dropped-by-sec-following-trump-pardon/

by xnx • 10 months ago

327 210 10 months ago

eletric-vehicles.com

yencabulator4• 10 months ago

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27996321

It's the party of rules for thee, not for me.

lokar2• 10 months ago

It turns out all of the "institutions", customs and traditions, not technically enforced by law, had an important effect on restraining corruption. Turns out they were only really enforced by the public, but with the general (intentional, IMO) erosion in faith in the government and institutions, the public no longer cares.

estearum2• 10 months ago

Well, many of these actions are illegal. But law is not self-enforcing. If POTUS is the origin of the corruption and his party in Congress doesn't impeach or otherwise constrain, then he's allowed to do whatever he wants.

twright• 10 months ago

"Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to whit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."

CamperBob25• 10 months ago

I'm always annoyed by that saying. It's basically an indictment of government power (and power in general), not just "conservatism." It could apply as well to Stalin and Mao as to Trump and the Bushes.

throw0101a3• 10 months ago

It's the party of rules for thee, not for me.

Hypocrisy is a virtue:

It’s best to understand that fascists see hypocrisy as a virtue. It’s how they signal that the things they are doing to people were never meant to be equally applied.
It’s not an inconsistency. It’s very consistent to the only true fascist value, which is domination.
It’s very important to understand, fascists don’t just see hypocrisy as a necessary evil or an unintended side-effect.
It’s the purpose. The ability to enjoy yourself the thing you’re able to deny others, because you dominate, is the whole point.
For fascists, hypocrisy is a great virtue — the greatest.

* https://mastodon.social/@JuliusGoat/109551955251655267

* Via: https://kottke.org/25/03/for-fascists-hypocrisy-is-a-virtue

2OEH8eoCRo0• 10 months ago

Disgusting

ToDougie• 10 months ago

Lest we forget:

"The entire infotainment system is a HTML 5 super computer," Milton said. "That's the standard language for computer programmers around the world, so using it let's us build our own chips. And HTML 5 is very secure. Every component is linked on the data network, all speaking the same language. It's not a bunch of separate systems that somehow still manage to communicate."

https://www.truckinginfo.com/330475/whats-behind-the-grille-... - April 24, 2019

nerdsniper• 10 months ago

Wow. Quotes like these really illustrate to me that I may have some massive blind spots and lack a lot of skills that help make people lots of money. This fellow is worth $3 billion and just spouts gibberish.

What skills does he have that I completely lack?

maxbond3• 10 months ago

Maybe what you have that Milton lacks is integrity.

kibwen• 10 months ago

What skills does he have that I completely lack?

As George Carlin would say, it's a big club, and you ain't in it.

lostmsu• 10 months ago

Is your tongue smooth?

tptacek• 10 months ago

Poetry. The ability to be awed by the wonders all around him, and to transmit that awe to others. A true communion with the fantastical.

cogman10• 10 months ago

Usually rich parents.

That said, looks like this guy is actually more of a "self made man" as he started several businesses out of college with moderate success. The first was an alarm company (Spoiler, those are generally MLMs and there's 100 of them). Looks like he was just successful enough at it.

It's not shocking to me that someone who starts an MLM ends up in trouble with the SEC.

candlemas2• 10 months ago

He doesn't have a conscience.

terminalshort8• 10 months ago

Sales

kolbe• 10 months ago

Nearly all people value good articulation over intelligence. This is why people who interview well get jobs over people who do good work. It's why Steve Jobs makes billions while Woz doesn't. And why Trevor Milton can bilk investors of claims about HTML5 supercomputers while nerds get brushed off talking about tensor-chip accelerated attention models.

The truly great founders, CEOs, and investors of our generation have generally been people who could see the difference between articulate and intelligent, and valued intelligence as the driving characteristic of people who built their products.

quickthrowman• 10 months ago

What skills does he have that I completely lack?

1. The ability to lie shamelessly.

2. Charisma.

3. Confidence.

The last two (or all three, really) can be combined into ‘salesmanship’, more or less.

sneilan1• 10 months ago

It's not skills that got him ahead. It's the connections to the "right" people that can be benefit him the most.

cheema33• 10 months ago

What skills does he have that I completely lack?

The ability to tell tall tales that are completely disconnected from reality. And be able to do so with utter confidence.

rasengan• 10 months ago

Either corruption was always happening maximally, and we've finally begun to notice , or corruption has reached a new maximum.

Either way, it's maximum corruption.

And we, the people, continue to choose "public discourse" as a mechanism to bring awareness and, perhaps, attend to the issue; yet, the discourse available to the people is limited, both economically and even in social media, algorithmically.

I hate to sound like a decentralization fanatic, but decentralizing power away from centralized actors is the only way we will be able to right these wrongs and essentially bring fairness to society.

We, the people, deserve to reap rewards based on skill and the proper application thereof.

SilverbeardUnix• 10 months ago

You have ethics and the ability to feel shame.

wrs• 10 months ago

Google "dark triad".

paulpauper4• 10 months ago

need to get me one of these HTML 5 supercomputers

itsoktocry• 10 months ago

What skills does he have that I completely lack?

You'd be amazed how "successful" one can be if willing to lie, cheat and/or steal.

vkou2• 10 months ago

What skills does he have that I completely lack?

It does not take any special skills to do this. All it takes is having no integrity.

somenameforme2• 10 months ago

I think the skill most people lack is just initiative and risk tolerance. Behind many, if not most, highly successful people, there's often a story of them just trying lots of stuff until something sticks. I have a pack of a few friends who have been doing this for years. I think most of their ideas are pretty awful, but who knows, maybe one day they'll be right?

Even this site is maybe a good example. You can apply to YCombinator with little more than a partner, plan, and pitch. The worst that happens is they say no, and if they say yes then you get a $500k funded shot at your idea with lots of advice on top and people trying to help you succeed. Yeah the chances of acceptance are low, but if you've ever read applications for pretty much anything, a ridiculous amount are just complete garbage, so your chances are better than the numbers suggest if you're halfway competent.

Terr_2• 10 months ago

https://xkcd.com/1827/

boringg• 10 months ago

That can't be real - wow. They were the company that rolled the vehicle downhill to make it look like progress right?

paulpauper4• 10 months ago

yeah https://arstechnica.com/cars/2020/09/nikola-admits-prototype...

Animats• 10 months ago

By order of Trump, that never happened.[1][2] Financial claims against Milton are now void.

The Führer is never wrong.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/28/trump-pardons-nikola-trevor-...

[2] https://www.justice.gov/pardon/media/1395001/dl

mandeepj2• 10 months ago

Check his Instagram! He's portraying himself as a saint, a massive victim, and vowing to sue everyone else, from Nikola for defrauding him :-)

pinkmuffinere3• 10 months ago

Wow, this is like an instant cure for imposter syndrome. I might hang this on my wall.

russdill• 10 months ago

vue, it's vue.

bflesch2• 10 months ago

Someone should be selling motivational posters with these kind of funny quotes from our dear "tech leaders". There should be a gallery of funny quotes to choose from so I can put them on my wall and feel better about myself.

pinkmuffinere3• 10 months ago

Same!! I'd definitely consider buying some for myself, and perhaps also as gag-gifts for other tech friends lol. I happen to have access to amazon merch from forever ago, which doesn't have posters, but does allow throw pillows.... I might spend the weekend playing with one lol

vjvjvjvjghv3• 10 months ago

And it receives data from a set of tubes which some experts call "internet"

ManuelKiessling• 10 months ago

That’s so wrong that even the opposite of it is wrong.

dreamcompiler• 10 months ago

This sounds a lot like Ted "The Internet is a series of tubes" Stevens. You can just hear the frustrated aide trying to explain a concept to him in the simplest possible terms and then he totally mangles it.

metadat• 10 months ago

Ah, thanks, I thought it was a series of tubes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_of_tubes

maxbond3• 10 months ago

Hindenburg was wise to pack up shop ahead of this administration. This is a greenlight for fraud.

jordanb• 10 months ago

Really interesting how the thesis for short investigation as a investment strategy relied on

1) investors caring that management is lying and being unwilling to invest in known fraud and

2) the United States being a nation of laws.

Both seemed like solid bets as recently as a decade ago

Y_Y• 10 months ago

I realise now you were most likely referring to Hindenburg Research

https://hindenburgresearch.com/

But some may find amusing my initial interpretation, that this was an oblique reference to Paul von Hindenburg effectively abdicating to a different government (which has been likened by some to the current USA leadership).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enabling_Act_of_1933

maxbond3• 10 months ago

Yes, I'm referring to Hindenburg Research, apologies. They were the ones who initially exposed Milton and called it quits earlier this year, presumably because they foresaw a regulatory environment where fraud was no longer reliably prosecuted.

philistine• 10 months ago

Paul never abdicated or willingly ceded power. He became too senile to understand what was happening around him. The fact this was hidden to the Germans at the time and it looked like nazi support hides the reality.

__mharrison__• 10 months ago

So much corruption

brcmthrowaway2• 10 months ago

What are the strategies here?

bflesch2• 10 months ago

Depends on your set of values.

jjcm2• 10 months ago

Possibly a more extreme one, but I got citizenship elsewhere.

Australia taxes more, make no mistake, and the earning potential is less. Living in Australia though was the biggest improvement to quality life I've ever had. I've lived in San Diego, Los Angeles, San Jose, SF, Portland, Seattle, Honolulu, and Sydney, and Sydney is #1 by such a large margin it shocked me.

My taxes went to funding public transportation that works. They funded government services like ServiceNSW that made me shocked how bad the DMV experiences were in the states. There's nationalized healthcare where I no longer had to worry if my friends could afford healthcare. The government has plenty of its own issues, but none of them felt as on the edge of the event horizon as US politics do.

I felt safe in Australia. With how things are again, I'm so glad I hold a passport with a kangaroo.

codyb• 10 months ago

“I don’t know him, but I was… they say it was very unfair. And they say the thing that he did wrong was he was one of the first people that supported a gentleman named Donald Trump for president,” the President said then.

The filing last month noted that “President Trump expressly decided here that Milton is factually innocent, the pardon did, contrary to the debtors’ assertions, wipe the slate clean.”

Absolutely disgusting. Now he's trying to pull 69 million in legal fees from the company.

candlemas2• 10 months ago

"Milton, 42, and his wife donated more than $1.8 million to a Trump re-election campaign fund less than a month before the November election, according to the Federal Election Commission."

https://apnews.com/article/nikola-trevor-milton-fraud-trump-...

vjvjvjvjghv3• 10 months ago

You have to respect that Trump is not even trying to hide anything

Tadpole9181• 10 months ago

No, I really don't.

ptaffs• 10 months ago

So, who loses money here and why aren't they upset? And are they important enough to worry the president. Those of us without stock aren't direct victims here, but someone must be. Bosch is mentioned in one story, I wonder what they're doing. My observation is lots of friends of the president are being forgiven crime, such as the J6ers, who if you believe the documentaries were violent toward the police, but the police aren't minding the pardons?

edot• 10 months ago

Former shareholders, whoever currently holds the assets of the company as Nikola is in bankruptcy. Unless those people buy influence, they’re worthless to the current admin.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/19/us/politics/sec-trump-cle...

Each of the above guys did the smart thing of buying influence (Milton retained the attorney general’s brother as his lawyer, for example). In the past you’d have to hide that better, but now it’s out in the open.

One of the guys mentioned in the article is now cleared to work on his new crypto venture. Of course.

Edit: not to “both sides” this, but it is interesting and mentioned in that NYT article that Biden pardoned a guy involved in a multi-billion dollar ponzi after serving 10 years (with 10 to go). Found an article from 2008 showing that the Bidens were linked with the firm. Not as direct of a quid pro quo but more the standard back scratching …

https://www.reuters.com/article/business/stanford-reportedly...

mikeyouse• 10 months ago

Commuting the remaining 4 years of a 17 year sentence (based on an 85% federal minimum) and leaving the financial penalties intact for someone who apparently had jointly marketed a hedge fund 20 years prior with a family member isn’t remotely the same as preemptively pardoning someone to save them $200M in fines and all prison time after they gave your campaign $2M.

mindslight• 10 months ago

Trump is a master in captivating people to cast aside their values and go all in for Dear Leader. I bet many of the people who were conned are still supporters, and eagerly asking for another serving of Kool-aid.

One of the most glaring examples of the effect is how in his previous term he led all of all of his supporters to the opposite side of a clear second amendment issue - the summary execution of Breonna Taylor in retaliation for Kenneth Walker's Constitutionally-protected act of night time home defense. This is one of the exact situations the NRA and wider gun lobby always invokes to rally support, and yet they just completely discarded it in favor of cheering on the jackbooted home invaders that came to make those "cold dead hands".

I'm just waiting to see where Trump's current gun control push is going to go. Gun registration/prohibition for "trans, foreign-looking people, liberals, antifa hiding under your children's beds, etc", but really anyone and everyone who might have some semblance of a spine. These cultists really have no values left.

xeromal• 10 months ago

I've seen these driving around Los Angeles and I'm always surprised. They actually kind of made it. lol

DevX101• 10 months ago

For anyone here planning on doing corporate fraud, just make sure you leave a $1-2MM line item for regulatory assistance.

qingcharles• 10 months ago

By "regulatory assistance" I assume you mean "campaign donations"?

xenocratus• 10 months ago

By "campaign donations" I assume you mean "bribes and kickbacks"?

paulpauper4• 10 months ago

this clearly did not work for SBF

rtkwe4• 10 months ago

No we don't even have to be that subtle any more just call it a gratuity and the supreme courts says it's AOK to give obvious bribes so long as no one provably said "I'll give you $X dollars for Y action". It's painful how blatantly the highest court in the land has been captured by the same people giving these bribes.

overfeed2• 10 months ago

No need to be that circumspect in 2025 - no one will investigate you; just funnel the money directly to a family member via a consulting gig, buy their shitcoin, or donate to a "charitable foundation" whose mission is to funnel money upwards

hypeatei2• 10 months ago

How long until this gets flagged into oblivion and conveniently forgotten? Posts that shine our Dear Leader in a negative light are unacceptable here.

awilson5454• 10 months ago

I’m sensing a shift. His base loves being on the outside. Now he has a trifecta and three and a half more years of power. It can’t be any more inside than that. Hopefully his influence starts to severely decline after each unforgivable action, like pardoning fraudsters who have close relations to his administration

9dev• 10 months ago

Have you read the Katie Johnson court documents? I don’t think it really gets anymore unforgivable than that, yet here we are.

tim3333• 10 months ago

I don't think it's about disrespecting the Dear Leader so much as a general policy that this is for tech and startups rather than politics.

hypeatei2• 10 months ago

Sure, but that's applied unfairly. For example: the Charlie Kirk killing was front page for a substantial amount of time but other topics related to free speech or corruption are flagged and demoted quickly.

mullingitover4• 10 months ago

The US is really in the worst of both worlds: it's a petrostate, the world's leading fossil fuel producer. With that comes all the tendencies for corrupt authoritarianism and democratic backsliding. However, we don't get the customary low direct taxes. In fact, the taxes are going up on the populace, significantly, (via tariffs) almost in lockstep with the increasingly brazen corruption.

IncreasePosts• 10 months ago

I think, to be a petrostate, you need to derive a huge part of your economy from pumping valuable stuff out of the ground. Fossil fuels in the US are like ... 6% of the US economy? Not nothing in absolute terms - if there was a "United States of Fossil Fuels", it would be the 12th biggest nation by GDP in the world. But still, America derives a vast majority of its economy from non-fossil fuels

mullingitover4• 10 months ago

That might be the case, but as far as the political party with a complete, iron-clad grip on the neck of the government is concerned, every other industry is an afterthought. For example, solar and wind are essential parts of an energy portfolio for domestic industry. These are being taken out back and kneecapped with billy clubs to prop up oil/gas/coal.

If the country isn't a petrostate it's certainly cosplaying one to a psychotic degree.

hangonhn• 10 months ago

Norway is a petro-state but is well governed and democratic. I think petroleum is an accelerant but the fire of democratic backsliding/authoritarianism has to already exist in the first place. We took it for granted the institutions and traditions that safeguarded our government and didn't really ensure those are kept healthy.

anon1919283• 10 months ago

Norway is a kingdom with royal family. Democracy is for the peaceful times. It's not full kingdom like ME but royal family directly have special laws that protect them. So not a full democracy.

asdff• 10 months ago

The key difference is in Norway the government owns the majority stake in their petroleum companies. Here, they are freely traded among capitalists.

rtkwe4• 10 months ago

The most forward and obvious difference is Norway runs it's oil as a state enterprise so there's less outside influence created by the money. It's not perfect and depends on strong institutions and norms to keep from looking like Saudi oil money but imo having it be state run definitely helps.

MandieD• 10 months ago

A well-governed, democratic petro-state that has been very, very careful to keep much of anyone there from getting too high on their own supply: unlike just about any other petro-state, the state's cut of petroleum revenues do not go straight out - it all goes into a permanent fund (Government Pension Fund of Norway), with a maximum of 3% being allowed to go towards current spending. Norway's domestic fuel taxes are actually higher than their neighbors, and Norwegians still have to pay VAT and income tax like the rest of Europe... though they still haven't joined the EU (but their EEA membership means that they agreed to conform to a lot of EU laws and standards)

kelnos2• 10 months ago

Yes, I think the bigger problem we have in the US is the lack of trust. The country was founded on the idea that you shouldn't trust your government at all. That concept is enshrined in our constitution with the 2nd amendment.

Not saying people should blindly trust their government, but we went for the other end of the spectrum instead, which is similarly unhealthy.

Kapura• 10 months ago

they fully control the federal government, doing exactly what they said they would do by flooding courts and firing appointees who are insufficiently loyal. they don't think they will need to ever deal with free elections ever again, and they think we're too stupid to do anything about it (bonus: decades and decades of underfunding public education means they might be right).

carabiner• 10 months ago

Take from the poor, give to the rich. It's an Ayn Randian gerontocracy.

Workaccount2• 10 months ago

The most important thing to note is that Trevor Milton, who plainly defrauded investors (rolling a model truck down an incline and calling it self powered), hired Bradley Bondi as his attorney.

Bradley Bondi is Pam Bondi's (yes the attorney general) brother.

myko• 10 months ago

Pam Bondi also famously took a bribe to allow trump off the hook before his 2016 run. Everything around trump is insanely corrupted by him. She was of course "cleared" of any wrongdoing in the situation, but it was extremely transparent: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/florida-ag-pam-bondi-is-cleared...

mullingitover4• 10 months ago

How to know all you need to know about the level of corruption the US is suffering: compare the dearth of news articles regarding the president's net worth increase of $3 billion dollars since taking office with the plethora of news articles covering his wife's wardrobe choices.

martin-t2• 10 months ago

So how to get these people punished? How do you punish people who are completely and utterly above the law?

EdwardDiego• 10 months ago

Also used to do work for Qatar, hence why it's not corrupt at all for Trump to accept a plane from Qatar.

bmitc• 10 months ago

I was about to ask just how evil he has to be to go out of his way to pardon this guy, but then here we are, realizing just how evil and corrupt he really is.

seltzered_• 10 months ago

"It has also been reported that Trevor Milton gave $920,000 to Mr. Trump’s political campaign (or $1.8 million combined with his wife) and was represented in this case by Pam Bondi’s brother."

Ylpertnodi• 10 months ago

Cool and normal.

yalogin• 10 months ago

Beautiful pay to play at work here. The tech leaders saw this way ahead of time and so aligned themselves with the administration and kissed the ring. They can get away with anything they want. At the very least, they know they will be able to get all regulations off their backs and get favorable regulations as well if they pay their way through.

ncr1002• 10 months ago

Is it legal to teach these kinds (in my personal opinion) of skills in Business School: either extortion (administration threatens / complains, companies pay, administration stops complaining), or the seeming corruption illustrated (again IMO) here?

- Extortion example: Trump in a White House Lawn gaggle interview this week complained at / threatened Australia's ABC reporter and then Australia itself with additional tarriffs, after the reporter asked about loss of freedom of speech relating to FCC complaining & threatening "big stick or little stick, you decide" to ABC/Disney who needed FCC's near-future approval for a pending business-merger, which ABC/Disney then terminated a thorn in the side of the President .. comedian Jimmy Kimmel. It's pretty clear, in my personal opinion, that this was extortion

Again, these are my personal opinions.

namuol• 10 months ago

Is it legal to teach [corruption]

Essentially what corporate law is all about. Huge drain on innovation and an accelerant for corruption. We’ve grown so used to it now that we don’t even see it. Agree to terms, move on. Hear about some class-action lawsuit relevant to you, but never get anything from it. Nowadays we don’t even have a right to class-action in most agreements we sign with corporations. The same vultures in corporate law are making their way into public law. It’s like mixing bleach and ammonia.

sschueller• 10 months ago

Next they will let Elizabeth Holmes go and I doubt Elon will ever see the walls of a prison for the crimes he has committed. At least while this fascist government is in charge and Elon doesn't piss off trump in some way.

kristjansson2• 10 months ago

Holmes

they're trying. https://theinventors.com / https://theranoslabs.com are up on billboards around LA with 'Elizabeth Holmes Innocent' marketing.

atombender3• 10 months ago

I don't know about "they". The billboards and the attempt to resurrect Theranos seems like a bizarro self-promotion stunt by a single guy named Ryan El-Hosseiny, who's been photoshopping himself into photos of Elizabeth Holmes, claiming the title of "CEO and Inventor", and insisting that he's known as "the Steve Jobs of medical labs" despite having no history in the medical industry.

terminalshort8• 10 months ago

What crimes would Elon ever see prison time for? And by crimes here I mean actual felony violations of criminal law that normally result in prison, not "crimes" that HN commenters typically accuse people of that are actually torts or sometimes just things they consider immoral.

mandeepj2• 10 months ago

For starters, he manipulated Tesla stock many times and defrauded customers on the pretext of selling fully Self-driving cars. Also, how many deaths have been caused by that?

This is a big one, but was settled https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/18/business/tesla-black-worker-h...

fogzen• 10 months ago

He likely violated the terms of his visa, which is a crime.

“I had to [stay in school]..otherwise I’d get kicked out of the country.” ... “since I already had my undergrad, I could..get an H1-B visa” (not correct, he had no degree in 1995, so he's already on record lying about many aspects of his visa and schooling situation)

"I was legally there, but I was meant to be doing student work," adding to The Post, "I was allowed to do work sort of supporting whatever." You cannot work "supporting whatever" on an F1, exceptions like OPT are restricted to specific programs. Musk has (more than once) admitted to violating the terms of his visa and working illegally.

Derek Proudian, a board member for the Musks' former internet startup Zip2, which they founded in late 1995, told the Post, "Their immigration status was not what it should be for them to be legally employed running a company in the U.S.," adding, "We don't want our founder being deported."

Musk had no degree in 1995. And it sounds like he was on an F1. If those are both true he was working illegally.

Snopes has a lot more details https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/musk-undocumented-immigran...

margalabargala• 10 months ago

Illegal immigration and investor fraud would be two. Elon has told more lies in official investor communications than others have gone to prison for.

tim3333• 10 months ago

But has Holmes got any money left?

paulpauper4• 10 months ago

Crime does pay , but only if you know the right people. Just having clout does not always work if you're seen as damaged goods or made an example of, like in the case of SBF.

Hilift• 10 months ago

Why would this be of importance given Trump already pardoned numerous violent felons and other cronies? Was it the e-vehicle association? Was it due to retail had not realized there are two systems of laws, one for retail and another for important people?

Zufriedenheit• 10 months ago

Wow. I did follow the case closely at the time. Trevor Milton is such an obvious fraudster. I could't understand how anybody believed him. Just knowing a tiny bit about technology is enough to tell that he was just talking complete nonsense in the videos that i saw. Now fraudsters are pardoning each other. The level of corruption is really unbelievable.

rvz• 10 months ago

If you knew this company was a fraud / grift, at least take a bet on shorting it all the way down like I did [0].

Plenty of companies out there that are just plain frauds like Nikola waiting to be discovered.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27996773

vjvjvjvjghv3• 10 months ago

You need some very deep pockets though to last long enough. I remember it took years from reading that Nikola is questionable to it going down. Same for Theranos. And Tesla is not a fraud but probably extremely overvalued. But it keeps going up.

rhetocj23• 10 months ago

Whilst Elon isn't committing outright fraud, he toes close to the line with his promissory sounding announcements and so on.

In any case, the fact we're even talking about this kind of behaviour speaks volumes.

panick21_• 10 months ago

Be a bad person and a scumbag, Trump will pardon you. And all the religious nutjobs will still vote for trump because all their moral crusades are complete lies and nonsense. Pure hypocrisy.

I followed Nikola from the beginning and it was patently obvious that the company was a scam. And they managed to get the company to the stock market and valued at many billions. Totally insane.

The way they did it was basically to run a huge amount of Facebook ads, but they were selling the stock, not the product. And once the stock goes up, everybody just gets in a mode 'surely if it goes up it will continue to go up'.

They played on all the pent up 'hydrogen' is the real future bullshit that people have been talking about for decades. He was also pretty good at reading the social media and always pivoting the the new thing.

The ended up raising such an absurd amount of money they legit had to start building a real company (try to).

ModernMech2• 10 months ago

I feel the worst for Nikola Tesla in all of this, having his good name ruined by two fraudulent companies.

givemeethekeys• 10 months ago

All the marketing for Nikola Trucks' stock was aimed at people with no background in tech or science. It was brilliantly diabolical. Fuck Trevor Milton.

abeppu• 10 months ago

However, last month, he argued that the bankrupcy plan does not fully reflect the presidential pardon he received.
The filing last month noted that “President Trump expressly decided here that Milton is factually innocent, the pardon did, contrary to the debtors’ assertions, wipe the slate clean.”

Ok so it's maybe not the very most important of the things that people have claimed the president has the power to do, but it sounds like this guy is saying not only does the pardon mean he's "innocent" but that he doesn't _owe money to people_? B/c the presidential pardon power is also an ability to declare what debts everyone does and doesn't have?

tempodox2• 10 months ago

That’s what it means to be a totalitarian leader.

yunohn• 10 months ago

“I don’t know him, but I was… they say it was very unfair. And they say the thing that he did wrong was he was one of the first people that supported a gentleman named Donald Trump for president,” the President said then.

tw04• 10 months ago

Someone should tell Trevor that a pardon doesn’t mean you weren’t guilty. He apparently missed that detail.

none25853• 10 months ago

For all practical purposes it does

ModernMech2• 10 months ago

Potential investors might not see it that way.

cainxinth• 10 months ago

When the person enforcing the rules is bribable, all criminals need to do is make sure they steal enough to pay themselves and the bribe.

Trevor Milton's Nikola case dropped by SEC following Trump pardon

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