Nikola is a company created in 2015 in SLC that was claiming to be about to produce a hydrogen fuel cell powered long haul truck. I don't know if the founder was LDS, but I'd be willing to put money on it.

In any case, the Utah reputation for fraud is secure.

From the NYTimes article:
------------------------------
A federal jury on Friday found Trevor Milton guilty of defrauding investors by lying about the supposed technical achievements of Nikola, the electric truck maker he founded.

Mr. Milton was convicted of one count of securities fraud and two counts of wire fraud, the most serious of which carry a maximum prison sentence of 20 years. He was acquitted on an additional count of securities fraud. The jury in U.S. District Court in Manhattan delivered the verdict after about four weeks of testimony and about six hours of deliberation.

Prosecutors portrayed Mr. Milton, 40, as a serial fabricator who wooed investors by falsely claiming that Nikola was close to producing long-haul trucks that could run emission-free on cheap hydrogen.

“Trevor Milton is a con man,” Jordan Estes, assistant U.S. attorney, said Thursday as she summarized the government’s case. “He lied to investors to get their money, plain and simple.”
----------------------

One of the stunts Trevor pulled was to make a video of one of his trucks silently running down the road. In reality the truck was rolling down a hill where there were no visual cues like vertical fence posts, to indicate it was a hill, so he just tilted the camera so the road looked flat.

That crosses the line from "excessive enthusiasm" to fraud in my mind. The jury agreed. There was a lot of money involved, and this was a pretty big case.


https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/14/business/trevor-milton-nikola-fraud.html

A BYU shirt and visible garments? Looks TBM to me!
https://www.reddit.com/r/exmormon/comments/izh8sc/trevor_milton_utahs_newest_billionaire_and_owner/

"This makes him the quintessential Mormon, a modern day Joseph Smith."

:))

And he had the biggest house in Utah (delusions of grandeur much?), which I suppose will now be the biggest foreclosure in Utah history.

I'm shocked...shocked I tell you!

>>In any case, the Utah reputation for fraud is secure.

Yep. Scammy religion, pyramid and "health supplement" businesses, creepy politics, etc., impacts people's view of Utah. It's nice to know Idaho is not the only state in the sewer of public opinion.

I find it particularly ironic that Utah has had 3 Attorneys General in a row that have been ethically challenged, to put it diplomatically.

It's scary and discouraging to say the least.

I read about a study, the results of which indicated that prayer could not be shown to be any more effective in recovery from illness than not praying.

In my mind this is a point in favor of establishing that religion, as in a belief in a ghawd who can fiddle with known statistics, is a fraud.

And that granting "beliefs" a favored status ought to be discouraged, if not outlawed.

All those in favor signify by raising your right arm to the square and say amen.

It could have been because the researcher was an unbeliever. Or that God is only there when you're not looking.

You will never find gnomes living in your refrigerator. Not because they aren't there, but because they only come out when the door is closed.

Does that mean you like it when the government gets swindled or do you only like it when the trump family does the swindling ?

Will Milton be excommunicated ?

That depends entirely on how much tithing he paid with the swindled cash.

One hand "launders" the other?

Unless TSCC exed him.

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

"Milton is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) and, after high school, went on an 18-month church mission to Brazil.[9]"

Also from same source:

"In September 2020, Aubrey Ferrin Smith, Milton's cousin, accused him of sexually assaulting her at their grandfather’s funeral in 1999, when she was 15 and he was 18.[42] The Wall Street Journal later confirmed several details of the accusation, including that Smith was, indeed, Milton's cousin and that Smith had told family members about the incident months after it had allegedly occurred. Family members also told the Wall Street Journal that religious authorities were notified, but no charges were filed."

Religious authorities were notified, but no charges were filed. Sounds like the mormon church.

Footnote 9:

https://www.trucks.com/2019/05/08/rough-childhood-helped-shape-nikolas-trevor-milton/
"Milton, a Mormon, credits an 18-month church mission to Brazil after high school with helping him learn to be independent – and to become fluent in Portuguese."

Missions are essential to learning how to lie, cheat, steal, exaggerate, and con.

Paying lots of tithing is essential to religious authorities looking the other way.

Don't get me started on the cold fusion scam and the gullibility of the university of utah administration.

Did the dale car evolve into the slingshot ?

Not to take any of the blame off of him, but I've seen other cases of investors throwing large amounts of money at concepts that they don't fully understand.

I will say that his ranch is really gorgeous. It's one of the few larger houses that I like. Most are too gaudy for my taste.

https://www.latimes.com/business/real-estate/story/2019-11-14/nikola-motor-head-trevor-milton-2000-acre-utah-ranch



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/21/2022 08:15AM by summer.

In a few years, semis at major ports will be all electric, and by 2040, the majority of all new OTR trucks will be electric or hybrids.

Electric is one thing, a proposed hydrogen fuel cell is quite another.

I'm saying that investors need to understand where they are putting their money. If they don't understand the engineering concept, they need to find someone who can understand it instead of simply trusting the company founders.

summer Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Electric is one thing, a proposed hydrogen fuel
> cell is quite another.
>
> I'm saying that investors need to understand where
> they are putting their money. If they don't
> understand the engineering concept, they need to
> find someone who can understand it instead of
> simply trusting the company founders.

Hey! That's how con jobs work! You impress on the perspective fundor that there is no time to waste, that they must buy now, before a competitor overtakes you! The fundor gives in and you're off to the (short-term) races!

As the late P.T. Barnum once said, "There's a sucker born every minute." How right he was!

Hydrogen fuel cells do not burn hydrogen, they strip the electron off and then return it to the proton by running the electron through an electric motor. That is the sense in which they were electric vehicles. The fuel cells generate electricity.

Fun fact - modern railroad engines are electric powered. The electric generators in the engine are powered by diesel engines, but the actual drive motors are electric motors powered by the generators. I'm not sure why that is, but I trust wikipedia has an explanation somewhere.

Hydrogen fueled cars already exist

https://www.toyota.com/mirai/

The biggest problem is infrastructure. As of this year, there are only 54 public hydrogen stations in the US - 53 in California and 1 in Hawaii.

It seems like all the or most of the snake oil corporations are centered in Utah, I guess it's a safe haven for them there

Now, about your extended car warranty. We've been trying to reach you...

True that fraud is all over. Not true that Utah is nothing special when it comes to fraud. We don't have some the the really big fraud cases - Enron, Bernie Madoff, but considering we are about 1% of the US population we punch way above our weight.

Various polygamist organizations have had some pretty big fraud convictions. There is one that I think is still wending its way through the courts about a scheme to fake production of biodiesel to obtain tax credits. It was in the hundreds of millions of dollars range, so this was no penny-ante fraud.

https://www.wired.com/story/lion-polygamist-and-biofuel-scam/

Speaking of snake oil, Utah has a well deserved reputation, thanks to Senator-for-life Orrin Hatch, for bogus nutritional supplements, or bogus multi-level marketing schemes, or bogus multi-level marketed nutritional supplements.

Mark Hofmann was essentially a fraud scheme. That made national headlines.

During the mid 20th century, Utah was the penny-stock fraud capital of the US. It was (and I suspect still is) the smallest city in the US with its own SEC fraud office.

And there was our piece de resistance - Cold Fusion.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/23/2022 07:23PM by Brother Of Jerry.

I watched a short doc' on his scam (the business is actually still going but with a totally different electric truck) but the most Mo' thing repeated in the script was "Fake it until you make it." (i.e. Packer's "A testimony is gained by the bearing of it.") and, like any good cult or scam: "...lofty promises without a shred of evidence."

BTW, I have a car that works on air; let me just tow it up to the top of this hill and show you how well it runs!

The rig was towed to a rise, then coasted downhill and video'd from a distance. I'd be curious if anybody can pinpoint that location.
Just curious.

I don't know where the film was made, but this article has a photo from the video - a whole lot of Utah looks just like this.

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2020/09/nikola-admits-prototype-was-rolling-downhill-in-promotional-video/

"Nikola doesn't claim that the truck had a working hydrogen fuel cell or motors to drive the wheels—the two key components Hindenburg stated were missing from the truck in December 2016."


Hydrogen and Hindenburg used in the same sentence ? I have a bad feeling about this.

LOL.

But it gets worse

The article also contains this "But last week, the short-selling investment firm Hindenburg Research published a bombshell report..."