Posted by:
Brother Of Jerry
(
)
Date: October 20, 2022 11:14AM
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:
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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.”
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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